I would like to see manual.seafile.com being available again. It was very useful and unfortunately the new Seafile Wiki cannot keep up with the old solution. Some of the issues I have are
all links are broken, forcing one to search everything again
the search does not work well, when clicking show more one has to login
the page loads (much) slower than the old one (some pages need more than 5 seconds)
one cannot submit documentation fixes and there is no versioning (at least no public versioning)
I agree, the new Seafile manual does not provide the same UX as the old one.
But: I suppose this will change quite a bit soon. The 2nd bullet in the list above will be fixed in the next release. As the wiki function progresses - and it will using the seafile roadmap as a guide - , the technical deficiencies vis-a-vis the old solution will also gradually disappear. So in terms of platform, I am against any change and I advocate patience.
More important to me than page speed and the availability of public versioning is content quality and consistency. There is lots of room for improvement there! Hence, my vote goes to improving structure and content of the manual.
I think this can also get better when it is possible to contribute. Be it just a corrected typo letting the manual look more professional or some additional technical information someone did research on.
The manual still cannot be found on Google. This is REALLY REALLY BAD. People are asking stuff over and over again and most probably they just don’t know where the docs are.
Additionally when clicking a link with ctrl it is not opened in a new tab (should be opened in a new tab). The issue also exists on https://www.seafile.com/en/support/
This poses problems on different levels:
a.) Unnecessary questions in the forum
b.) Poor visibility of Seafile in general on Google
c.) Poor customer experience because they don’t find the required information
d.) If wiki pages do not get indexed, this is a show-stopper for the use of Seafile’s wiki function
Fortunately, this problem should be easily fixable.
the robots.txt still fully blocks search indexing. What about whitelisting all the public wikis?
Another solution could be to deny indexing share links and allow everything else.
@shoeper: Thanks for following up! You are absolutely right. The fact that the pages of the offical Seafile Manual are not on Google is most unfortunate. It means that for most Seafile admins these pages are not visible and thus do not exist.
But there is one more thing to make matters worse: there is a confusing number of alternative “Seafile Manuals”.
This would be much less of a a problem if the official Seafile Manual always ranked above the alternatives, but this is not the case!
I just did a quick Google search and found these three “alternative manuals”:
How should the admin interested in Seafile know that - besides these three he/she finds right away - there is actually another one and that, in fact, this extra one is the official one?
This is a source of frustration as the instructions in the alternative manuals are not accurate and/or outdated. The user thinks he/she is doing everything right and it does not work. Or he/she is looking for installation instructions for current OSs and there are none.