Thanks for commenting, sorry about the long discussions on the topic :)

I'm trying to think of a 10-20 year timespan, so a lot of the decisions
look weird when thinking on a 1-2 year timespan.

> One note from me it will be really hard to optimize (SEO) of the website that
> important information is on sub domain, it will hurt scheme.org when
> optimizing and collecting links and it will hurt any subdomain. That's why
> when people write blogs if they know about SEO and they want to promote the
> page they pick up example.com/blog about not blog.example.com. The second is
> different website and example.com will not benefit for good ranking of
> blog.example.com.

This is good advice. Please see my comments in the SEO thread.

> Sub domain for implementation that is not redirect is perfect but IMHO
> sub domain that is just redirect make no much sense to me.

Does it cause harm, or is it just unnecessary?

> GitHub pages have separated directories for different repos for same users
> and it work fine. I don't see the reason why scheme.org can't have
> directories that are git repos.

It can, but the Scheme language is a somewhat politically contested
entity. Scheme programmers disagree often on a lot of things. It's
important to make sure one group cannot interrupt the work of another
group. To keep the front page stable long term (10-20 years) we would
have the best chance of reliability if www.scheme.org contains a minimal
amount of content.

Then we can have administrators who are _only_ responsible for
www.scheme.org and DNS changes, and that is a very easy job that takes
maybe 10 minutes a week. Then we can easily find people to do that job
in any situation.

If we mix www.scheme.org and DNS administrators with other admin roles,
it's less clear what those people are committed to do, what their
responsibilities are, and whether they can be politically neutral. There
are a lot more unresolved questions long-term (10-20 years).

> It not make much sense to me to have sub domains if the websites will look
> the same. There are lot of benefits of making it just different path of same
> domain. It will probably take some work to make they directories separated,
> but I'm not an admin of DevOps so I'm not 100% sure how hard it would be.

I've done the DevOps so far, and it has been very easy. No problems of
any kind.

Do subdirectories have other benefits besides SEO?

> It seems that right now different sub domains are just single html page they
> don't even have structure so it can be just faq/index.html (accessed with
> just faq/) making thing like FAQ separated domain make no much sense and it's
> overkill and when someone search "scheme faq" faq.scheme.org will need to be
> optimized separately. Have like 10 domains to optimize for search engines
> will be really hard to make it right.

You're right. I'm always thinking about a 10-20 year timespan for
everything we do on the site that affects the URL structure. That means
a lot of things won't look like they make sense today.

For example, currently lists.scheme.org is just an index.html. But in
the future, we can run a whole mailing list server on that subdomain,
and serve mailing list archives on the website. If the current URL is
lists.scheme.org, that URL can stay the same even if we move all the
mailing list stuff to a completely different server. It's more future-proof.

If we started with www.scheme.org/lists, and later moved it to
lists.scheme.org, we would have to set up a redirect. The www.scheme.org
admins would then be responsible for maintaining those redirects, which
would make more work for them. I believe the workload of the
www.scheme.org admins should be as small as possible, if we want to have
an easy time finding a neutral administrator at all times.