I have a feature request for the manual component of the website, specifically Dorico. I have Dorico v4. Often when googling Dorico-related queries, results from older versions (v2, v3) are indexed. In some cases, I can simply switch “v2” to “v4” in the url and get the page I need, but often after taking some time to realize I’m in the wrong manual. In other cases, there is no corresponding page and I need to re-find the page in the v4 manual.
An example I like is the Django documentation. It has a version selector at the bottom, and if a version is not supported, it will have an alert at the top of the page saying so.
This is true! I have never failed to find what I’m looking for, and I have bookmarked the v4 documentation homepage. However, I like to use Google because it is great at interpreting my vague searches and showing me what I’m looking for. So this thread is more of a suggestion, a feature request, to solve an issue that I imagine others encounter too.
Edit: I saw someone placed this thread in the Dorico subforum. I originally posted it outside of the that subforum since it doesn’t pertain specifically to Dorico. It appears that a lot of Steinberg products use the WebHelp system.
Welcome to the forum, @mikitimik. Our manuals team are aware of this issue and they are hoping to introduce a banner on the older manuals so that you can be provided with a link to the current version.
Perhaps you could also try bookmarking the Dorico Pro 4 webhelp landing page, and searching directly in there (or the Elements or SE equivalent, as required): over the years, I’ve added various terms, metadata, and links to other pages to the manual, and actually direct searches can be surprisingly effective these days.
But long-term, Daniel is also right that the manuals team is aware of the issue of online searches bringing up older versions of the manual (because they’ve been around longer), and that for a couple of reasons (primarily changes in functionality or necessary structural changes within the manual itself) simply replacing the version number in the URL isn’t always sufficient to switch across. There are a number of potential solutions and it’s something we’re looking at.