When you search for Postgres related things, an old version of the documentation is often indexed. Similarly, some answers on sites like Stack Overflow link to old versions of the documentation.
pg_docs_bot helps you avoid the annoyance of having to click “Current” when you get there, the frustration of having read the whole page before realising it was an old version, or even not realising that it was an out of date version.
Naturally, this extension doesn’t help solve the root cause(s) of this issue. There have been at least two good conversations on the PostgreSQL mailing lists about how to teach the search engines which version to link to. Please continue to encourage people to link to the “current” version around the web, which will gradually help!
Features:
* Redirects links to the “current” version
* After redirecting, displays a notice (including a link to the page you were redirected from)
* Avoids redirecting some deprecated features (to avoid 404s)
* Doesn’t redirect when coming from another page in the docs, so you can still check old versions (the main problem with generic redirectors)
Limitations:
* Only supports redirecting to “current” (request support for other versions on GitHub)
* Works for the English language docs
* Works for version 7.0 links upwards
* Chrome extension works on a limited list of search engines and stack exchange sites (to avoid needing permission)
Example:
Try searching for “postgresql create index” on your search engine of choice. At the time of writing, on DuckDuckGo, the 9.1 version of the docs is the first search result (whereas the “current” version is 12.2).
Requests, issues, contributions:
There are some feature ideas listed on GitHub. Bug reports and contributions are also welcome.
So tired of searching something in Google, and finding a bunch of links to… 9.3 documentation. It’s a minor hassle to have to remember to opt-in to the current documentation, and this extension removes that effort entirely.