If you do a Google search for "LibreOffice Calc help", the top result is Welcome to the LibreOffice Calc Help - LibreOffice Help https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Welcome_to_the_Calc_Help Jul 19, 2013 that page and most of what it links to look plausible, but they seem to all be old wiki help pages that are obsolete. E.g. "Main page" is https://help.libreoffice.org/Main_Page ; if you navigate to Menu help at https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Menus , it completely omits the Styles menu; etc. Many of the other links in Google search results are similarly to old wiki pages, including "Spreadsheet functions" and "Functions by category". Only the second result LibreOffice Help https://help.libreoffice.org/ redirects to up-to-date 6.0 help. I assume you don't want to update this old wiki help material. Some mix of the following would address the problem: * Each help wiki page should display "DEPRECATED, OLD HELP FOR VERSION 3.14, online help for recent LibreOffice now starts at https://help.libreoffice.org/". A MediaWiki template or modifications to the wiki skin could do this. * You could take the technique that redirects help.libreoffice.org to version-specific help, and reuse it on these wiki pages. * You could add rel=canonical links to the <HEAD> of wiki pages that link each page to the latest documentation, which would encourage Google to rank these pages lower than up-to-date documentation in results. * You could simply delete these wiki pages (the Wayback machine has them), or archive them on another site. I'm sure there's a bug about deprecating old wiki help pages, but I couldn't find it. Outdated wiki content is the bane of documentation :-)
Two years on, I search for "libreoffice calc conditional formula". The first four results are for LibreOffice Calc 3.6, 4.0, 4.1, and 3.3. Good news: they have all have a pink bar warning they're for old versions (my first suggestion). Bad news: I have to visit link after link after link to try and find documentation that applies to the product you currently provide! For the love of $DEITY, someone please `rm -rf` all the old web pages! They're still messing up search results. They're for LibreOffice versions that haven't been supported for years. They make the LibreOffice user experience DRAMATICALLY WORSE for people using recent versions.
skierpage, the LibreOffice Design Team has a survey open right now at https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2020/06/10/please-participate-in-a-survey-on-our-web-presence/ asking users for feedback on their online presence. I think you could share your criticism there. I wholly agree with you, and I myself criticized the horribly awful split between the old LO documentation, the new one and TDF's wiki in my survey response.
To me the best option would be a dropdown menu at the top of all help pages which allows you to choose the still version you want help for (including fresh versions would be impractical), similar to what Laravel does with its documentation. You can check it out here: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x
(In reply to mat.venturini from comment #2) > skierpage, the LibreOffice Design Team has a survey Thanks, I filled it in. (In reply to mat.venturini from comment #3) > To me the best option would be a dropdown menu at the top of all help pages > which allows you to choose the still version you want help for (including > fresh versions would be impractical), similar to what Laravel does with its > documentation. You can check it out here: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x Maybe for supported versions. But LibreOffice 3.3 reached end-of-life *nine years ago*. Everyone's experience would be so much better if some brave hacker just deleted the old cruft right here right now. BTW, searching for "Configuration caching Laravel" gives me three results for "Caching - Laravel" with identical breadcrumbs "laravel.com › docs › cache". At least the 7.x is ahead of 5.0 and 4.2 results. Which reminds me, help.libreoffice.org has the same Google breadcrumb problem: whether 9 years old or brand new, search results have similar breadcrumbs e.g. "help.libreoffice.org › Calc › Conditional_Formatting" for a help page for version 3.6, 7 years old.
> Maybe for supported versions. True. For some pieces of software, as is the case for programming frameworks like Laravel, it is necessary to keep the documentation and help for old, unsupported versions because some IT depratments cannot keep up with the latest releases despite their efforts, since a lot of code-breaking changes are made with each release. With LibreOffice, though, that's certainly not the case; even if someone still uses Windows XP and has LibreOffice 5.x, they certainly can still navigate around and use the applications even if the help system contain entries for LO 6.x and 7 (when it gets released). I also have to mention that it is really weird that LO still allows for bugs for unsupported versions all the way back to 3.x to be filled here in their Bugzilla, as if these versions were still supported, it feels really weird. But considering how out of date their Bugzilla installation is, I can't say I'm surprised. > BTW, searching for "Configuration caching Laravel" gives me three > results for "Caching - Laravel" with identical breadcrumbs > "laravel.com › docs › cache". I never tought much about this until you mentioned it now. That's true, it can be really annoying, but it's really easy to solve: just make the most up-to-date version of the page indexed by search engines, really not sure why the Laravel webmasters didn't do this yet. If users want help for an older but still supported version, you can access it by the menu. Another annoying thing is that if you are reading about a feature from an older version and you then choose a more recent one in their website but this feature was removed in this new version you selected, you will get a "sorry but nothing was found" page. Why not just not include this version in the list then? Just rambling...
(In reply to skierpage from comment #0) > If you do a Google search for "LibreOffice Calc help", the top result is > Welcome to the LibreOffice Calc Help - LibreOffice Help > https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Welcome_to_the_Calc_Help > Jul 19, 2013 > This has been fixed in the meantime. Any search engine that points to help.libreoffice.org/whatever will redirect to the latest published help.
(In reply to Olivier Hallot from comment #6) > (In reply to skierpage from comment #0) > > If you do a Google search for "LibreOffice Calc help", the top result is > > Welcome to the LibreOffice Calc Help - LibreOffice Help > > https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Welcome_to_the_Calc_Help > > This has been fixed in the meantime. Any search engine that points to > help.libreoffice.org/whatever will redirect to the latest published help. Great, but I just searched for "libreoffice calc pivot table", and the second result in DuckDuckGo is for the LibreOffice 6.3 Help, https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/scalc/guide/datapilot_createtable.html?DbPAR=CALC , and this does not redirect anywhere. So DDG search engine at least is not redirecting to 7.5 for this case. Google's first nested search result is to https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-GB/text/scalc/01/12090102.html and the second is to https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/guide/datapilot_createtable.html , so Google seems smarter. (The first result in both DuckDuckGo and Google is for the Calc Guide for LibreOffice 7.1, https://books.libreoffice.org/en/CG71/CG7108-PivotTables.html , slightly less obsolete but not the guide for the "Fresh" or "Still" branch. I mentioned this in the community forum, I don't know if that should be a separate bug.)
The results for some searches such as the previous mentioned "libreoffice calc pivot table" still return some results for older versions such as 6.x an so on. https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/guide/datapilot_createtable.html