Online Manual Version Navigation Suggestion

Dorico
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A small (but I realize not simple) suggestion.

Issue:
When searching via google for dorico reference docs, it’s very common for older versions of the manual to fill the results (often with no recent versions in the first multiple pages).
This confuses new users, and can be frustrating to work around for experienced ones, since there’s no easy way to navigate to the same topic in a current version.

As an example, Scikit Learn (popular python machine learning library), not only recognizes and warns the user that they’re looking at an old version of the docs, but provides a direct link to the same topic in the current version.
Example here (I guess I can’t include links in posts?):
https://scikit-learn.org/1.5/auto_examples/cluster/plot_kmeans_silhouette_analysis.html

I realize this is accomplished by using a very different URL scheme than dorico docs do (especially, replacing the specified version in the URL with stable always links to the current stable branch), but I’m sure there are other approaches using redirects that would work as well.

A frequent user/lurker of either the Facebook group or forum would probably agree that referencing the wrong version of the manual is a pretty common occurance, and I think something like this would remove that issue (or at least shift more agency to the user to recognize they’re using the wrong version).

Plus, it could be a pretty solid bandaid solution to google’s complex ranking behavior prioritising older manual versions.

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Out of curiosity, why are you searching the manuals via Google?
There is a powerful search function on the help website and there you can easily select the release you want to search.

1 Like
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This has been discussed before, Simon, but thanks for taking the time to post your idea. We are thinking about what solutions might exist to help mitigate this in future.

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Fair enough. Thanks to both of you!
@JuergenP reasonable point, but still a bit slower than googling, and a different search algorithm that I’m less familiar with (and therefore much slower - I use google hundreds of times per day), more cramped UI for results, different result ordering algo, etc.
Also doesn’t help all the people who don’t know any better, for whom it still causes a lot of confusion!

@dspreadbury my apologies - I found a few threads of previous discussion but wanted to add the sklearn example which I thought was pretty slick.

Thanks for both of your responses!