Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A Help page: call for improvement suggestions

Identify and protect key slugs Some help topics are linked to from within the software. For example, the search page links to the topic for advanced search, formatting help is linked when creatin...

posted 5d ago by Monica Cellio‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Monica Cellio‭ · 2025-01-12T18:51:33Z (5 days ago)
**Identify and protect key slugs**

Some help topics are linked to from within the software.  For example, the search page links to the topic for advanced search, formatting help is linked when creating a post, and I think there's a warning about images without "alt" text that links to that topic.  I think there are a couple more cases.

Communities can edit their help, including deleting or refactoring topics.  What happens if a community changes or removes one of these special pages, so that those built-in links are no longer meaningful?  At the moment, people editing help don't see any cautions about this and we don't protect those URL slugs from being changed.  Can we prevent accidental breakage?

We'll need to compile a list of help pages that have these extra dependencies.  We should make that information available (somehow), and perhaps we should "lock" those URL slugs and prevent those pages from being deleted.  A message could be shown when editing, to alert editors to the dependencies.

I don't think we should lock these pages down entirely.  Communities have already extended the original formatting help, for example.  We want communities to be able to adjust help in the ways that meet their own needs -- we just want to avoid accidentally breaking dependencies.