Correct GitLab and reverse proxy guides and suggest changes

[zapaul]

I looked at two or three guides the other day and have a few things to note.

Duplicate content This applies to a lot of guides. Currently, if a guide belongs into multiple product categories, it is just copied entirely and accessible under multiple URLs with the only change really being the title and associated product. Especially for long parts of content like this, this is duplicate content. I would expect Google to de-emphasize both sites for all of these cases since they are just the same. This also adds additional text to the very beginning of title (like "VPS"), which is a very prominent part of the site. However, it's really not of any use.

I have corrected the guides I made edits to anyways in a way I'd do it (remove product specifics from the page, link to one single file, add all possible products in the meta data and write more discoverable title).

Example: "VPS: Installation of Certbot" VS. "Setup Certbot on Linux server", which I think is much more to the point and closer to what users search for and how titles of pages usually look like.

Linux reverse proxy guide The stream module is not part of any default nginx build and therefore not of the nginx package. The author might have installed nginx-extras or nginx-full? Currently, users would get a unknown directive stream error. I can't vouch for anything besides Debian / Ubuntu, but the installation instructions for other OS should be correct aswell.

GitLab guide I'm sorry, but I don't know how to describe it other than the guide being low effort and low quality, inconsistent and incomplete copy and paste.

Step 1 is called "Updating Linux Server". It does not do that, but it installs packages and configures a firewall. I'm not sure why the author installs curl at that point. He already does at a later point in the actual requirements installation step, again. Must be copied from some other online guide, in which it makes sense. This part is only for Debian-flavored OS, some other parts aren't. The firewall is enabled before the whitelist is configured. Definitely not the correct order of doing it. Most commands use sudo, another doesn't. Here, -y is not used for package installation, later it is being used and then, again, it is not being used anymore. Here, apt install is used, later commands don't. I corrected all that and moved it to the end of the article.

Step 2 is copied from the docs while adding a line before some groups of commands. Another firewall configuration for OpenSUSE in addition to the above, but leaving out the step, which checks if the firewall is even used.

Step 3 I think shows once again that this is quickly put together from multiple sources without understanding what actually is being done. Or it's just because it's quickly copied together. The author advises users to enter the /tmp directory. What for? The "installation script", which is not an installation script, but adds the repositories to the package manager, is never written to a file in the current work directory with the command from the official docs he put into the guide. I understand how this happened. Other external guides first download the script so users can look into it to make sure it doesn't do anything malicious. He only copied the script for setting up the repository for Debian-flavored OS again for whatever reason. The next part is suddenly for multiple OS again. However, this time with comments after the commands instead of Tabs.

I think I cleaned all of that up, too, while adding the missing pieces.

[fgalz]

@zapaul I'll have a detailed look at the content of the other guides mentioned as soon as possible, but by then I already want to share the following information on the topic of duplicate content:

The situation with the duplicate content is implemented for a reason. I followed the same approach in the past, generalizing the guides we had that could be applied to multiple products and designing them in such a way that they could be integrated for all suitable products. The main issue with this was that Docusaurus functionality was limited. If for example a guide with the name “install-servicename” was offered for vRootserver and Dedicated Server, there was always the issue that when a customer selected the guide in the Dedicated Server sidebar, the sidebar jumped to the vRootserver area because the same ID was recognized there first. As a result, the customer then only saw the guides for vRootserver.