Sorry to resurrect an old thread, this seemed so close to going through.
I agree with the UX tweak being needed -- I've missed that button a t
least a couple of times myself, and I am the one who put it there :)
+1 for changing this, I also never saw the button somehow.
I do think the bigger question is if we want the actual /current/ URL
to be the canonical one, rather than the /<version number of current
version>/?
I would've guessed that's better? But again I don't realy know, that's
a guess, so if it was considered and rejected for good reasons then
ignore that comment :)
I think this is important, but that either would be a big improvement over the status quo. I think there are a couple of advantages of going with /current/ as the canonical URL though:
1. Search engines factor in being told what is canonical, but it is only one factor they consider[0], so I think there'll be benefits of the URL we mark as canonical not changing every year (although links that are only one major version old would be a lot better than the status quo).
2. It would make it more common for people to link back to the /current/ URLs on Stack Overflow, in blog posts, and similar. In the vast majority of cases this will improve the experience for folks following those links in future, and it will also help search engines be confident that the /current/ version is the canonical one.
Having said that, I'd favour pushing the proposed patch over doing nothing, as it will still be a big improvement! Thanks for all the work on this so far.