[discussion] archiving and retiring the Dot

[Carl Schwan]

On Monday, 2 October 2023 14:58:41 CEST Kenny Duffus wrote:

Hi,

> >   * e.V. news is posted at the e.V. page: https://ev.kde.org/news/
> 
> I am unlikely to be the only one that doesn't regularly check those places

It's true that not a lot of people are checking this place regularly, but all 
the blog posts from the e.V. website are also on planet which many more people 
are following and which our Rss readers are by default following.
> 
> >   * Many teams have their own blogs (https://eco.kde.org/blog/,
> > 
> > https://gcompris.net/news-en.html, etc.)
> > 
> >   * Akademy updates are posted at the Akademy page:
> >   https://akademy.kde.org/
> 
> That is not correct, Akademy makes a huge use of the dot for sharing info to
> the wider community
>
> You can see this by looking at the articles on https://dot.kde.org/

Yes, akademy.kde.org is not used for news about akademy. But the goal of this 
proposal would be to move the source of truth for akademy news from 
dot.kde.org to akademy.kde.org. This would centralize the information about 
Akademy on one website instead of splitting it betwen dot.kde.org and 
akademy.kde.org. It won't change the fact that most KDE contributor who follow 
planet, will see the announcements.
 
> > What does the community think of this idea? Do you support it? Oppose it?
> 
> I think its a terrible idea
> 
> KDE needs somewhere for official news, having that just mixed in with blog
> posts would make them much harder to find and be drowned out in noise

We currently already have multiple sources for official KDE news (kde.org/
announcements, ev.kde.org, dot.kde.org) and then various sub-project specific 
sources for official news from the specific sub projects (eco.kde.org, krita.org/
news, kdenlive.org/news, ...). And while Planet contains a mixed of blog post 
and announcements, it is the place where people are reading about KDE news in 
addition to social media.

The proposal is to ensure our new announcements are on kde.org/announcements 
unless there is a better place for them on another of our website (e.g. Krita 
news probably should be on the Krita website, e.V. news on ev.kde.org/news, 
...). This is something we are already doing for most of our announcements and 
doing it for the dot, would allow us to archive one website that we otherwise 
need to maintain.

The maintaince cost for dot.kde.org is very high as we are still using Drupal 
7 which is EOL since a long time and it is getting urgent to port all 25 years 
of content to either Hugo or Wordpress or archive it.

Just to give some numbers, we get around 120 visits a days on the dots (this 
includes bots). To put this into perspective, we are at around 14 000 visits a 
day on kde.org. (both numbers don't include the RSS feed, just normal visits).
This number increase to around 500-900 on the dot when we publish an article 
and 20 000-30 000 on kde.org when we publish an announcement. So dot is not 
very actractive in term of reach for Promo goals.

A few years ago, promo was using the dot a lot more as we had the issue that 
kde.org/announcements was not available via a RSS feed. This caused us to also 
write some short announcements for our big releases on the dot, just to make 
the announcements also visible on planet and on akregator. This created 
additional work for the KDE promo team but it is fortunately a solved issue 
with the switch of kde.org from an hand crafted php framework to hugo. This is 
also why the number of new articles on the dot is quite low.