Links to various files starting with http://math.uga.edu/~pete
and http://www.math.uga.edu/~pete
no longer work, but they can be fixed by changing the start to http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete
.
Here are a few examples of such edits done manually: one, two, three. (Other examples can be found using SEDE.1)
There are many such links on this this site (and also on MO).2
Proposal/request. It would be nice if the conversion described above could be done in bulk rather than by manual edits. I would suggest doing this both on Mathematics and MathOverflow.3
Of course, such mass replacement can only be done by Stack Exchange employees. Still, I would suggest waiting a few days - to see whether somebody notices some possible problems or has some comments. (Moreover, it would be good to hear from Pete L. Clark whether he has some feedback.) And only after that this post should be retagged as status-review to get the attention of a community manager.
I will stress that it should be http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete
and not https
.
For example, http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete/integral.pdf works - while the link https://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete/integral.pdf does not work. (I suppose that if the site switches to https at some point, it would be again possible to convert such links in bulk.)
Why not other links on the same domain? This replacement does not work universally. To include just one example, links which were originally under math.uga.edu/~pollack
are now on the domain pollack.uga.edu
- as you can see in several posts where such links have been edited, such as here. (There are other links to the domain math.uga.edu but this change should cover the majority of them.)
Potential problems.
Some links might still need attention or manual edits - hopefully there won't be that many. (We might try to collect the posts which will need attention after the mass replacement in a CW answer. In any case, fixing the exceptional cases manually should cause much less bumping than manually fixing all posts.)
- Dead links. There might be some links which are broken both in the original location and after the modification.
- Wayback Machine. If there is a link to a Wayback machine snapshot of
http://math.uga.edu/~pete/example.pdf
, changing the string in the body of the post tohttp://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete/example.pdf
will break the link. - Both links. There are some posts which contain both the "old" link and the corrected link (for example here).
- I will explicitly mention that I did not check links in the comments at all. Comments are intended to be ephemeral, so they are probably less important. Moreover, comments cannot be edited manually (by non-moderators) - so we would not be able to deal with the exceptional cases.
- There are also posts which contain link just to http://math.uga.edu/~pete/ - this link redirects to http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete/ (so it is not broken); but the replacement would simply be the redirect. (Specifically, it is this answer and this question - I did not find other such posts. Both of them are returned when searching for pete/" in SEDE - I am not sure whether there is some better way to find such posts.)
General questions.
This is the first time that I posted a suggestion on this meta which would influence multiple sites. (Although my feature request on MathOverflow Meta would influence several sites, too: Can (and should) Project Euclid links be replaced in bulk?) And I am also relatively new to suggestions for bulk replacements of URLs. So I would be glad if the Stack Exchange employees who handle this would mention some general guidelines which would be useful to follow for similar requests in the future.
Some specific questions I have in mind:
- I suppose it is better to start a new question for a feature request like this rather than just updating a single post. (Such as this one: Domains with dead links.)
- Are some additional steps needed for suggestions which concern more than one site - or, in some cases, networkwide replacement? (Since Mathematics and MathOverflow have rather similar topics, I would guess that - at least to some extent - similar websites are linked from these SE sites.)4
- Does the search-and-replace tool modify only the URLs or does it change all occurrences of the given string in text - even if they are not links?
- If such string occurs as a part of a link to Wayback Machine, will that be modified, too?5
- Is it (at least sometimes) reasonable to consider links in the comments, too?
- If the substitution is done networkwide, is it done on per-site-metas, too? (For example, replacing the strings in this question and the answers would break a lot of links. At the same time, one could imagine a broken link to some domain in a meta post which is just a regular link, not a link illustrating problems with some domain - as here.)
I will include a link to a post which contains some further information about the bulk replacement tool: Domains with dead links. In case you want to contact me in connection with this suggestion and you do not want to leave comments here, you can use my chatroom. Perhaps also Boulevard of Broken Links or MO editor's lounge are suitable for discussions related to fixing links - and I visit both of them relatively often.
1Here is a query that finds both posts and editors and the same query for MathOverflow. In case this query times out, here is a less complex query - which doesn't show the editor - for Mathematics and MathOverflow.
2You can find such posts by searching for url:"*http://math.uga.edu/~pete*" or for url:"*www.math.uga.edu/~pete*".
Of course, any such search can be restricted to one site - such as Mathematics or MathOverflow.
You could find some such post also using SEDE: MO1, MO2,
MSE1, MSE2.
The database sometimes contains %7Epete
instead of ~pete
- as you can see in this query.
3There are a few such links also on Academia Stack Exchange: search for http://math.uga.edu/~pete and search for www.math.uga.edu/~pete. I would guess that the number of posts on that site is small enough for manual editing.
4When I previously asked in chat, the advice from the CM, I was told that it is not necessary to make a related posts on multiple meta sites.
5Now that the tool was run, we can say that answer to this question is: Yes. For example, MO330913, 124472. (The fact that only some of such links were edited might be a consequence of a bug in the bulk replacement tool.)
http://math.uga.edu/~pete -> http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete
&http://www.math.uga.edu/~pete -> http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete
). It is a direct string find and replace. It looks like there will be a couple cleanup items from that, but it looks like they're well-characterized here. $\endgroup$