Issues with the new suttacentral website

This is an important problem for us, so please wait a little while, we will try to figure something out.

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Dear Bhante,

I’ve just moved to this new computer a few days ago. So, I have to try to find a way to get Google Chrome to be my search engine. :crying_cat_face:

Never mind, it will be worth it!

Hello Bhante,

I think a simple solution would be to redirect the language based urls’ to the sutta card, at least it sounds simple :smiley: .

For example:

SuttaCentral

would redirected to:

SuttaCentral

I won’t say this should be trivial, but it should be workable, so long as it doesn’t overflow to break working url’s :wink: .

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Dear Bhante,

I’ve managed to set ‘Google Chrome’ as my default browser. Now I can access the new version (though it took me sometime to find this page).

:slight_smile:

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Yes, this is probably the simplest idea. Of course nothing in tech is really simple!

The problem comes from the complexity of the data, and from the fact that the old URLs simply have less information than the new ones. But the good news is that a fix doesn’t have to be 100%, as many of the more obscure texts probably have few links. So long as we can capture the majority of the main ones, we should be okay.

Our techs have discussed this, and will do more in future, but meanwhile if there’s any programmers out there who’d like a crack at this problem, let us know!

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Thanks, Bhante. I know these things take time. I’m involved in the editorial side of getting my unit’s website sorted out at work…

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Thanks for your response Bhante,

I’m not quite ready to crack on this issue, however something propped up whilst I let that question be.

Basically, it depends on how the site handles http 404 errors, and how we could use that to our benefit.

So, not knowing how it works under the wood, I wonder if it would be possible to customise the content shown on http 404 error, and possibly to do url manipulation to show (valid) url(s) that could be derived form the “wrong” url?

This way we don’t make the decision for the end user, but we can offer a panel of options on potential places he may want to go to?

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Yes, I’ve thought of something similar.

We could take:

/en/mn2

And convert it to:

/mn2/en/sujato

First we’d have to teach it to recognize ISO language codes. We only use about 40 of them, so that shouldn’t be too hard.

Then snip the code out from where it is an put it after the ID. Not sure how hard that is, but okay.

Then the author. This gets tricky if we have to run through a list and find who the author of that particular text is. With over 70,000 texts it gets gnarly fast. We can do a quick and dirty fix by just putting my translations for the 4 nikayas in English. That would cover a lot of the existing links, but it wouldn’t fix all the problems.

Anyway, our devas know this stuff best, let’s hope they come up with something.

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We almost agree.

Almost :wink: .

As I’m still inclining toward pointing to the sutta card, so the decision is left to the end user, and we don’t add any complexity at the system level :d .

I tend to do that whenever possible. Push out the decision process whenever possible, so I don’t actually add my own assumptions in the system :anjal:

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Yes, fair enough, that is probably the most practical solution.

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I am super low tech too Dheerayupa. The browser I use, Safari, is not working for me on my computer either :cry:

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We believe we have a fix for the Safari problem, please try again in a few days. Meanwhile https://legacy.suttacentral.net/ is still there!

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Issue with the bigger header on D&D when not logged in fixed too.

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Google chrome mobile does not work well with discourse site.

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The Discourse site has not changed at all. Only the way it looks has changed. If you want to revert back to the old theme, go to your Preferences --> Interface and change the theme to ‘SC legacy theme’ and press SAVE at the bottom.

Another thing you can do is find the app for Discourse in the Google playstore or iTunes and use that.

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You can find any sutta by going to suttacentral.net and in the menu click on SUTTA, then select which collection you want (MIDDLE for MN), then click on ‘Majjhima Nikaya’. Then you will get a suttaplex list with all the MN suttas and you can select which one you want and which translation.

You can also refine the number of suttas you get by clicking on the right-arrow next to ‘Majjhima Nikaya’.

Hope this helps!

Oh that would be so great, thanks. Will keep checking. BTW, even though Discourse works, I can no longer bookmark posts (trying to save some that have tips for doign things since I’ll never remember). Guess I’m living in the wrong century (this time around)… I seem to be useless with anything technical…

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Having a bunch of dead links out there on various forums and in bookmarks kind of scares me as a web guy.

Not only is it kind of bad user experience, but any sort of search engine “juice” (links, etc.) to those pages won’t flow anymore. And we all know, he who controls the spice…

Redirects shouldn’t be too hard, most webservers allow some redirect rules, but you’ll most likely have to use the dreaded regex. 40 languages is a lot of rules, I would imagine most links out there are English though, but 40 many times over makes for a kind of overwhelming config file… unless you have a regex wizard on hand — they could probably conjure something up.

Another suggestion if I may — a more useful/friendly 404 page. “Didn’t find what you’re looking for? Try this search function or browse the directory here”… something like that.

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Yes, this is a known issue and we are working on it. We hope to roll that out in the next week.

You should be able to bookmark things by clicking on the three horizontal dots below the post and then the full menu (including the bookmark) should appear. Let me know if that works for you.