On 8/31/05, HÃnandil hinandil@freespirits.org wrote:
Absolutely. Imagine:
Article A -> Art. B -> Art. C -> Article A
And don't forget to tell him that Special:DoubleRedirects lists such problems with redirects, all the easier to fix them with. :)
Special:DoubleRedirects is a pretty inane concept. There should just be an admin bot to go ahead and fix all those links.
At the very least, that special page should have a series of links (or preferably checkboxes and a submit button) to fix each double/triple/whatever redirect.. making them all redirect to the final target.
Frankly I would see value in an automatically self-healing setup where redirects adjust themselves after being followed to point down the chain to that final target page.
This A -> B -> A nonsense is just silly.
A > B > A when followed once A becomes just A with no redirecting.
A > B > C > B when followed once, A becomes A > B
There's overhead, but not that much overhead, for a self-healing redirect concept.. just do the overhead the first time a user visits a redirect and ends up with a redirect.
It might indeed be too much overhead for every redirect to check if it ends up with a redirect every time it is visited. One simple admin function to just "go fix all of that crap" would work though..
/rant
(Btw, yes, I have to learn to program so I can do it myself..)