On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 16:33:18 +0200
Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> wrote:

> 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.

It all make perfect sense I think I'm convinced.

As for SEO after site is live we can check how scheme.org and other domains
rank. I would try to think to make as small number of sub domains as
possible as per Occam's Razor.

Maybe start github issue where each comment is different sub domain and there
are reactions (we can vote on sub domain or down vote to have it).

Unless you know any better idea for voting on sub domains. The comment can
look like this

	Domain: foo.scheme.org

	Rationale: explanation why it's needed.

People will vote. I'm not sure how many people follow the threads and are
willing to vote.

Also each domain can be separated issue where will be able to comment against
on in favour of given domain.

--
Jakub T. Jankiewicz, Web Developer
https://jcubic.pl/me