Hey there!
I recently wanted to search something and in my search results a result appeared with a link to (https://wwwtest.qubes-os.org/). Seems like it’s the website where translation gets tested but so far it’s tough for me to find documentation that points to that website. Maybe I’ve not searched deep enough. Does that website belong to the Qubes Project? I think it does but I’d like to have confirmation, since I don’t seem to get it elsewhere. Maybe mentioning it somewhere to avoid confusion would be good.
I’m new around here so please forgive any mistakes I’m doing and feel free to point me into the right direction.
This is a staging area to test out modifications to the website before
they become available on www.qubes-os.org. It is generated by CI scripts
when a committer requests it in a pull request.
So unless you are working on the Qubes OS website, it has little value
to you and might at times even contain incomplete or wrong information.
Thank you for your quick reply! The only question for me then is if there should be a hint or an indication that this is not the main/official/stable webpage. I do not know the extend of the incomplete or wrong information since normally I’m on www.qubes-os.org and look up my stuff there. Is it negligible? Would that be a question worth another post?
The only question for me then is if there should be a hint or an
indication that this is not the main/official/stable webpage.
Well, it shouldn’t be linked to or indexed by any search engine, but
then you found it in your search results – which is an issue. I am just
not sure what we can do about it.
I do not know the extend of the incomplete or wrong information
since normally I’m on www.qubes-os.org and
look up my stuff there. Is it negligible? Would that be a question
worth another post?
No, don’t worry. Most of the time wwwtest will be identical to the
official site.
I guess it search engine indexing could be prevented on the robots.txt just in case. But not sure how impactful how this will be. Probably having to always keep this change could be a git pain.
@marmarek, is there any way you can hide wwwtest from search engines?
Usually it’s used to test things like layout changes, refactoring, new translation switching mechanisms, etc. It is difficult to imagine how malicious content would get in there, but AFAIK nothing is specifically done to prevent that from happening, since it is simply a test area for web dev use and not at all intended for users to see. Of course, FAQ: “Should I trust this website?” still applies.
Not sure of the exact CI process you have set-up, but the best way would be to have a unique robots.txt file just for wwwtest.qubes.org with the following content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
I’ve done something similar in the past where I added a step to CI for staging deployments to copy robots-staging.txt to robots.txt.