Bug Fixes
It's not often I have to say this, but: yesterday we released some SEO changes designed to remove trailing slashes from URLs that did not go well. First, we noticed some issues with search. Then, we discovered that a couple customers' custom haproxy redirects stopped working properly, causing some navigation and access issues within their knowledge bases.
Today we totally rolled back that trailing slash change. We're evaluating other ways to implement the same end behavior without impacting search behavior or custom redirects.
Mainly I am sharing this release note so that if you noticed some odd behaviors on February 5th-6th, you don't take time trying to troubleshoot them because they were our fault and we have now fixed the thing that caused them.
What you might have seen:
- Searches in non-English characters were showing no results in full search results (but may have been fine in the autosuggest search)
- Searches in quotes like
"delete account"weren't showing the quotes and instead showed something like%22delete%account%22 - Searches involving phrases like
delete accountwere showing a % instead of a space, likedelete%account. This was most obvious in the Searches with 0 Results reporting. - For customers using custom redirects, you may have had navigation issues or homepage loading issues
We undid the change that caused all of these issues, so you won't see it going forward. We just wanted to keep you informed in case you did receive reports from your authors/readers or noticed anything odd in the search dashboard reporting for this week.
In short: we tried to change something to benefit customers, which broke a couple things, and then undid the original change so nothing would be broken, and now we're exploring alternative solutions.
I promise, we'll have happier updates soon, and thank you to the customers who immediately reached out to let us know something was off--it helped us identify where the issue was to get things addressed as quickly as possible!
