Score:-4

Drupal

Dealing with tens of thousands of 404's when migrating from MediaWiki to Drupal

redirector

8/19/23, 5:10 PM

I have a MediaWiki 1.36.1 website with nearly 2,500 content webpages (generally all of these are either article or Category:) which I consider to migrate to Drupal.

Moving each piece of content from MediaWiki to Drupal isn't feasible due to heavy usage of MediaWiki syntax inside the source code of each article and I either can't or don't want to translate it to Drupal CKEditor syntax.

I might backup and delete the MediaWiki website, run it locally on a local server environment and then manually migrate about 500 relevant articles to my online Drupal installment (on the same web domain).
The problem with that is that I would have nearly 30,000 404 webpages because MediaWiki creates at least 10 webpages per each webpage (1+15, if not 1+ 150 if not double than that) such as:

Talk webpage
History webpage
Revision webpages
History diff webpages
What-links-here webpage
Recent-changes-in-webpages-linked-from-here
Printable version webpage
Permalink version
Information about this webpage — webpage
Source code webpage / Edit webpage
Statistics webpages
And probably more

I can of course buy a new domain but I want to stay with the same domain.
I thus probably need to automatically redirect all 30,000 404 webpages to the homepage.

How to migrate all 404 webpages to to the homepage by Drupal itself and is there another, better approach to solve my problem?

0 + 0

redirection

cilefen

8/19/23, 6:30 PM

You are going to have to explain to us what you mean about MediaWiki creating at least 10 webpages per each webpage.

redirector

8/19/23, 6:38 PM

@cilefen generlaly every MediaWiki webpage has a also a talk page, an history page, at least one revision page (each time it is edited a new revision page is added so there could be thousands, each one anew after each edit), revision diff pages, etc.

redirector

8/19/23, 6:41 PM

@cilefen I have edited to clarify.

cilefen

8/19/23, 6:43 PM

Not knowing the specific URLs I can't give a specific answer. But I can suggest that if this is Apache web server and you are able to modify the .htaccess, with some carefully written regex redirects (or rewrites), you could link these extraneous paths back to each given page.

redirector

8/19/23, 6:55 PM

@cilefen I don't want to do this, I want to just "move on" from the 404's and to "start over" with the Drupal `nid/*` paths.

Score:1

Drupal

4uk4

8/19/23, 7:05 PM

I thus probably need to automatically redirect all 30,000 404 webpages to the homepage.

No, you just need to configure the front page as default 404 page at admin/config/system/site-information.

Then use the module Block In Page Not Found to create a block explaining that the front page is shown because the visitor did request a URL no longer available.

But I seek an automatic brutal way for all 404s.... There is a module for that Redirect 404 to Home Page. Including a warning on the module's page:

Warning

Redirecting all 404 pages to the home page is not preferable for SEO. Please use this module if you have less number of 404 pages.

0 + 0

redirector

8/19/23, 7:10 PM

Thank you for your answer. Why do you suggest to do this allegedly longer way instead of a global redirect for all 404's?

4uk4

8/19/23, 7:30 PM

I think a 404 is more appropriate. I hate it when websites redirect in such cases. This only makes sense if you can offer similar content for what the visitor is looking for.

redirector

8/19/23, 7:31 PM

But these redirects would be only from Google, not from articles inside my website...

4uk4

8/19/23, 7:36 PM

OK, if you want to redirect then create for each migrated node meaningful redirects. See https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/227978/how-to-create-a-redirection-programmatically

redirector

8/19/23, 7:37 PM

But I seek an automatic brutal way for all 404s....

redirector

8/19/23, 7:38 PM

If it must be with Apache than so be it, but is it really a must? Doesn't Drupal offer anything for that behavior?

redirector

8/19/23, 7:42 PM

You know what? Maybe I'll just buy an old domain I have from nearly 6-8 years ago and start over with that without any broken links.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Dealing with tens of thousands of 404's when migrating from MediaWiki to Drupal

TH: จัดการกับ 404 นับหมื่นเมื่อย้ายจาก MediaWiki ไปยัง Drupal

RO: Se confruntă cu zeci de mii de 404 la migrarea de la MediaWiki la Drupal

RU: Работа с десятками тысяч ошибок 404 при переходе с MediaWiki на Drupal

VI: Xử lý hàng chục nghìn lỗi 404 khi chuyển từ MediaWiki sang Drupal

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