Main title should be changed and link to help.ubuntu.com

[pmatulis]

I am concerned about the main title on docs.ubuntu.com:

Ubuntu documentation

This can cause confusion since official Ubuntu documentation is already hosted on help.ubuntu.com.

d.u.c is like:

"Canonical Ubuntu documentation" "Canonical Cloud documentation" "Canonical-sponsored documentation"

It should also include a link to h.u.c :

"For official Ubuntu documentation, go to help.ubuntu.com."

[pmatulis]

The motd file that spits out links upon user login (on every Ubuntu system) should be updated.

/etc/update-motd.d/10-help-text

#!/bin/sh
#
#    10-help-text - print the help text associated with the distro
#    Copyright (C) 2009-2010 Canonical Ltd.
#
#    Authors: Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@canonical.com>,
#             Brian Murray <brian@canonical.com>
#
#    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
#    with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
#    51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

printf "\n"
printf " * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com\n"
printf " * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com\n"
printf " * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage\n"

[nottrobin]

As discussed in IRC:

• We should change the title
• We should link to help.ubuntu.com
• Consider changing domain name to docs.canonical.com or something similar

[nottrobin]

Decide what to do with docs.ubuntu.com domain

[caldav]

@pmatulis myself and the rest of the Marketing team were toying with the docs.developer.ubuntu.com domain name. I agree that the current solution, especially the title, could bring confusion to end users.

@nottrobin I have a "card not found" on the above ^

[nottrobin]

@caldav yeah that looks to our trello board. It adds those links automatically

[pmatulis]

@caldav I find docs.developer.ubuntu.com awkward.

Suggestions:

• devdocs.ubuntu.com
• cloud-docs.ubuntu.com
• canonical-docs.ubuntu.com
• docs.canonical.com

Recall that Landscape, which is, by and large, a private project will be linked from this domain. So using a ubuntu.com TLD may not be appropriate.

[anthonydillon]

I was under the impression that the docs site would be hosted at docs.ubuntu.com.

If there is concern that this domain could be perceived as a location dedicated to the desktop OS. Then I believe being creative with the subdomain will not levitate this concern. I believe we could continue to use docs.ubuntu.com. With a link to help.ubuntu.com at the top of the site.

Sorry if I have missed something. What are your thoughts?

On Sat, 26 Nov 2016, 20:27 Peter Matulis, notifications@github.com wrote:

@caldav https://github.com/caldav I find docs.developer.ubuntu.com awkward.

Suggestions:

• devdocs.ubuntu.com
• cloud-docs.ubuntu.com
• canonical-docs.ubuntu.com
• docs.canonical.com

Recall that Landscape, which is, by and large, a private project will be linked from this domain. So using a ubuntu.com TLD may not be appropriate.

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[pmatulis]

The problem is that docs.ubuntu.com is a very general sounding domain name that suggests that it is for documentation for the Ubuntu project as a whole, which it is not. I suppose we can rejig things so that it does do that, in addition to the Canonical-led stuff. Note that help.ubuntu.com hosts documentation for the Desktop and Server. Also the main thrust of that site is that it contains all official Ubuntu documentation, no matter the type.

[nottrobin]

I've been considering this for a while, and I think on balance I'm with @anthonydillon on the domain.

I think the whole point is for docs.ubuntu.com to be a general-sounding domain. It's meant to signify that it's a single platform for all documentation - Ubuntu Core, Snapcraft, MAAS, Landscape, Vanilla-framework, documentation-builder itself, and hopefully eventually Ubuntu API docs etc. etc..

I did initially appreciate the argument that docs.ubuntu.com makes it sound like it's exclusively documentation for Ubuntu the operating system, but I don't think there are any better alternatives. docs.developer.ubuntu.com is too long, and makes it sound like it's exclusively docs for developer.ubuntu.com (which it isn't) and in any case has the same "ubuntu.com" problem, and docs.canonical.com is just too corporate. Hosting Core documentation on a canonical.com domain would send entirely the wrong message. In any case, a whole host of different content sits under ubuntu.com - both the site itself and its various subdomains.

I do accept that there might be some products that aren't at all comfortable sitting under an ubuntu.com subdomain (this may apply to Snapcraft for example, as it's meant to be a cross-distro tool). But in that case I'd rather develop the ability for docs.ubuntu.com to have other domains pointed at it, so that Snapcraft docs could be at docs.snapcraft.io, but I still think the central domain for the service, and where the docs homepage lives, should be docs.ubuntu.com.

I do however wholeheartedly agree that the content of the docs.ubuntu.com/ homepage should be changed to clarify the difference between the roles of this docs.ubuntu.com platform and help.ubuntu.com (though I'm not yet 100% clear on exactly what those differences are).

@pmahnke do you have any thoughts?

[pmahnke]

Moving the site will resolve nothing. There are going to be two sites pointing to documentation. We need to make sure it is clear for anyone to find all the docs that we do have. I would propose to:

1. change the text of the docs.u.c site to not add the confusion (e.g. change 'The home of Ubuntu documentation.')
2. include links to the server and desktop help.u.c docs in the list of docs in 'Featured documentation'
3. perhaps include links to other docs as well, like LXD, conjure-up, etc.

I would also like to talk to the community team about making the docs tools available to them to use as well.

[pmahnke]

Closing this as we have fixed most of the issues.