Re: BBC Online and "deleting" websites
This is a direct response to today’s post on the BBC Internet blog on the subject of “deleting” old BBC Online content. I tried to use the comments system, but it just hung when posting. Ho hum. Usual disclaimers apply:
My post last month explained that we were exploring a range of options for managing legacy content. “Deleting the lot” was not one of them, though offline storage is.
There are two separate issues here: one is that of preservation — archival — for which “offline” storage of some kind might be an option (I presume what is meant here is actually proper offline storage — tape or optical media backup). For the purposes of much of the public, offline storage, and similar options which don’t provide ready access to the archived content are of no value except in the long term. Great, it’s been hived off somewhere — now what?
This leads to the second issue: don’t break the Web. Contrary to protestations, there are very few well-designed and well-managed sites out there which will actively delete content because it’s a little inconvenient. Indeed, I can’t think of a single one. In the course of technology changes, sometimes things will get broken, but this is considered almost universally to be a failure of process, not a deliberate choice!
There are, essentially, a few different scenarios which might apply to the various different directories:
Content which is outright damaging, even with disclaimers in place. If this is the case, there’s no reason why anybody would wait until now before removing or modifying it, so this is rather moot.
Content which is so horrendously broken as to be worthless. I don’t mean “looks bad”, but actually broken — completely useless. There may or may not be anything which falls into this category, but it’s easily dealt with if so (but don’t forget those HTTP 410 Gone responses).
Content which is too expensive to maintain in its current form: snapshot it, and if necessary move it somewhere else and put in a redirect. If it’s just part of something which has broken, work around it as much as possible — for example, disabling search facilities.
Content which has been supplanted completely, for example by /programmes: archive it for posterity and put a redirect in place, though fall through to #5 if it’s something which is of particular interest in its present form.
Everything else: disclaimer (much like the one which already exists, but beefier; link to more appropriate resources). You could even do something clever like a timed-redirect with a “no, I really want to see the old one!” button which sets a cookie.
I’m not sure there are any other options, really, and if there are, this post (actually, the previous post) should have been the place to outline them. Even if it’s not been decided what exactly will happen to each and every top-level directory, those responsible should still know what the options are and should be making them clear.
What’s concerning about this is actually that it’s taken two blog posts (so far) and I’m not at all reassured by the processes at work here — and from some of the reactions I’ve seen, I’m not alone: it’s clear that “delete the lot” isn’t on the table, yet “delete some of them” may well be (as far as the average browser is concerned, at any rate) — without knowing which is likely to get the chop, the enterprising hacker who shall remain nameless figured it was safest to grab copies of all of them. It’s difficult to fault the logic, there.
For what it’s worth, this:
To restate our intentions: we are moving towards a rational content lifecycle for our websites as practiced by many other sites across the web. The aim is consistent high quality everywhere on the site. We have a number of stand-alone websites which will in due course become obsolete and need to be managed.
…doesn’t half sail close to management-speak, and though par for the course, it doesn’t really aid in reducing confusion.
Possibly the most worrying aspect of all of this is that it’s a great big effort under the banner of delivering cost savings to the Licence Fee Payer, focussed on treating symptoms, rather than the root cause. Somebody (who I shan’t name) remarked recently to me that “the thing I find most insulting is that they think we’ll believe that reducing the number of top-level directories will actually correlate with savings”.