[Archive-access-discuss] Replaying redirects

[Kristinn S. <kri...@la...>]

Hi all,

I have an issue with redirects.

It is semi common for us to have crawled an URL like http://www.example.com only to find a 301 or 302 to http://example.com (or vice versa). The second URL is then crawled a few seconds later.

This creates two issues.

1. The first capture (the redirect) is rendered by default when a user selects that particular date. This starts the user off on a URL redirect notice page. Less than ideal.

It is possible to just resolve the redirect immediately, without alerting the user, but that will cause them to see an URL from a slightly different time than they expected.

Also, as a side note, the XML search results used to contain the destination for redirect captures, but no longer. This limits my options of dealing with this in the frontend search results.


2. When navigating search results using the "last" arrow on the injected Toolbar, if the previous capture was such a redirect, you will not get anywhere as the redirect is resolved by sending you back to the same capture you are on.

I found an instance of this in Internet Archive's Wayback: http://web.archive.org/web/20130602062836/http://timarit.is/

Try clicking the back arrow. You are not going anywhere. It doesn't even give you the URL redirect notice.

You can, of course, use the sparkline or jump by years/months, but moving one capture at a time is a desired ability.

I currently have it set so that redirects are never resolved behind the scenes.

Another side note. Why does the toolbar disappear when displaying the URL redirect notice? Many URLs have gone from serving content to being a redirect and back (sometimes repeatedly). Just because you hit a redirect doesn't mean that you are either going to want to follow it or go back. You may want to choose another capture for that URL from the toolbar. This is actually easy to fix (as I have done), but I feel displaying the toolbar should be standard.


Anyway, that is my rant on redirects. Any thoughts and suggestions?

Best,
Kris

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