Great news, overall. However, do notice that, by all indications, this migration will in fact break links, for the case of “links to comments on a deleted LW1 post”. As I mentioned on LW1 itself, given such a LW1 “permlink”, you can freely explore “parent” comments and replies. Lesser Wrong does not support individual “permlink” pages, so it simply links to the individual comment as part of an “all comments” listings, which breaks in the “deleted page” case (It also impacts the case of a page with a large number of comments—if only from a sheer usability POV—because a user is now effectively forced to load all comments instead of just requesting what she’s actually interested in—and possibly even with “what she’s interested in” being buried in a deep subthread somewhere, beyond the “load more comments” feature and nowhere to be found in what actually was loaded!). I mention this in a simple comment here rather than opening a formal “issue report”, because I do not regard this as a true “bug” with the site that can be easily fixed or that even has truly significant impact. However, since (due to the vicissitudes of early LW1 history, with at least one major contributor having wiped his whole presence from the site!) there is actually quite a bit of early content that’s impacted by this, it may be something to think about at a later time, for a more complete restoration of early LW history.
There’s also an argument for not fixing it, in that if an author deletes his whole posting history then he might want all traces of it removed, and making the comments (which contain information about the post) inaccessible respects that wish more than keeping them available.
EDIT: though that said, people were promised that existing links would continue to work when they voted about the migration, so sticking to that promise is a more important priority and we should actually fix this.
This seems quite right for the new feature of “private blogs” here on LW2, and for “drafts”, which IIRC behaved as you describe, even on LW1. But ordinary posts on LW1 were unambiguously public (both in the Main and in the later-added Discussion section)--roughly equivalent in visibility to “Featured” posts here on LW2; and once you choose to make a post potentially eligible for such status, it would be quite unfair if you could wipe both its text and its attached comments with the click of a button. (Note that a ‘deleted’ post did become anonymous, in addition to having its text wiped out; people might have been able to figure out the original author if she happened to be mentioned in the comments but this only occurred rarely, so there was quite a bit of reputational protection. And really, much of the value in large comment threads is actually in side-discussions that are only tangentially related to the ‘OP’, if at all.)
Great news, overall. However, do notice that, by all indications, this migration will in fact break links, for the case of “links to comments on a deleted LW1 post”. As I mentioned on LW1 itself, given such a LW1 “permlink”, you can freely explore “parent” comments and replies. Lesser Wrong does not support individual “permlink” pages, so it simply links to the individual comment as part of an “all comments” listings, which breaks in the “deleted page” case (It also impacts the case of a page with a large number of comments—if only from a sheer usability POV—because a user is now effectively forced to load all comments instead of just requesting what she’s actually interested in—and possibly even with “what she’s interested in” being buried in a deep subthread somewhere, beyond the “load more comments” feature and nowhere to be found in what actually was loaded!). I mention this in a simple comment here rather than opening a formal “issue report”, because I do not regard this as a true “bug” with the site that can be easily fixed or that even has truly significant impact. However, since (due to the vicissitudes of early LW1 history, with at least one major contributor having wiped his whole presence from the site!) there is actually quite a bit of early content that’s impacted by this, it may be something to think about at a later time, for a more complete restoration of early LW history.
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that functionality. Thanks a lot for pointing this out, and we will get around to fixing this.
There’s also an argument for not fixing it, in that if an author deletes his whole posting history then he might want all traces of it removed, and making the comments (which contain information about the post) inaccessible respects that wish more than keeping them available.
EDIT: though that said, people were promised that existing links would continue to work when they voted about the migration, so sticking to that promise is a more important priority and we should actually fix this.
This seems quite right for the new feature of “private blogs” here on LW2, and for “drafts”, which IIRC behaved as you describe, even on LW1. But ordinary posts on LW1 were unambiguously public (both in the Main and in the later-added Discussion section)--roughly equivalent in visibility to “Featured” posts here on LW2; and once you choose to make a post potentially eligible for such status, it would be quite unfair if you could wipe both its text and its attached comments with the click of a button. (Note that a ‘deleted’ post did become anonymous, in addition to having its text wiped out; people might have been able to figure out the original author if she happened to be mentioned in the comments but this only occurred rarely, so there was quite a bit of reputational protection. And really, much of the value in large comment threads is actually in side-discussions that are only tangentially related to the ‘OP’, if at all.)
Do you have an example of such a link? (Mostly want to make sure I understand what syntax we’re referring to here)
Not grandparent, but browsing through my private notebook for potentially breaking links, eg:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/deg/less_wrong_product_service_recommendations/6yry ← which is one specific advice (and a good one at that) vs https://www.lesserwrong.com/r/discussion/lw/deg/less_wrong_product_service_recommendations/6yry ← which is 404. This actually do have a high impact both on other sites linking specific comment threads, and by extension, on SEO in general (linked page with content changed to empty).
( Relatedly, https://www.lesserwrong.com/non-existing-page returns HTTP 200 instead of 404, which is more wrong, than http://lesswrong.com/not-existing-page )
Quick note (partly for my own reference as I check which of these we have fixed)
The first two links look they got fixed by Habryka’s recent patch.
I haven’t looked into the final issue, thanks for pointing that out.