Cache Pages Users Link To?

  • Resolved questions4wp

    (@questions4wordpress)


    11 years, 10 months ago

    This is kind of a weird request of the forum because of the technical issues involved, but it occurred to me that when hunting down answers to various WordPress questions, one is likely to stumble upon this forum. Generally when people post questions that are specific to their site, they provide a link. However, if the question is about an issue or error message or something, the goal of the forum is to help to correct that issue or error. Thus, after a few days, hopefully the problem is solved.

    The problem with this is that someone searching for a similar issue, let’s say a similar error message, would not be able to find the post, unless the user copied and pasted as well as provided a link. Another example of this problem is if someone said “My navigation bar is all messed up, see it here: -link-“. If the forum is successful, that link will be worthless shortly, as the answers on the forum should help the user correct the navigation bar problem. There’d be no reason for anyone who stumbled upon the post to click on that link.

    Is it in any way feasible, or even possible, to make some kind of cache on the wordpress.org side of the pages that forum users link to? A before/after would be extremely helpful in trying to determine if a user’s problem is similar to mine. It would be a static cache and thus not PHP, but I think it’d still be useful. Thoughts?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 10 months ago

    Huh. That’s an interesting thought.

    I think the problem is that the phrasing of the question would always be really subjective, and not as worthwhile as we’d think.

    “My navigation bar is all messed up, see it here: -link-” is, let’s admit it, a pretty common sort of problem, and a pretty terrible way to describe it 😉 If I was googling and saw that, I’d never know what they were on about. Basically I don’t think the folks we’d get from the search would be as valuable to justify the effort right now.

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    11 years, 10 months ago

    Cache external pages? On forums that average 2 or 3 new users per minute? That hardly seems feasible. And what would be the use – given that (despite what people think) the root causes of issues with similar symptoms could be very different?

    I really don’t see the benefit for all that effort.

    Plus some posters get really upset when they find out that, no, we will not remove their site’s link from their posts after their problem has been solved. Can you imagine what they’d do if we started caching pages from their sites? If that ever happens, I’ll be taking a very long holiday. 😉

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    11 years, 10 months ago

    I’d drink more. Oy, hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking yet. Ouch.

    Thread Starter questions4wp

    (@questions4wordpress)

    11 years, 10 months ago

    Heh didn’t think about that part, great point!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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