Redirect stable pages to 3.5 when they appear to be a 3.5 page

[Giwayume]

Your Godot version:
3.5
Issue description:
There are a ton of links around the internet that link to the /stable/ docs but are expecting 3.5 pages. They are now all 404 since the 4.0 release.

Search engines:

And of course, Q&A forums:
https://godotengine.org/qa/

Reddit:
https://reddit.com/r/godot/

It would be nice if something could be set up to automatically redirect pages that look like they're meant for a 3.5-specific topic to the /3.5/ URL if they are directing to /stable/.

[YuriSizov]

We can add a banner to the 404 page, same as we have in the latest branch for articles that exist in stable. But I don't think we can do automatic redirects between versions.

[ohin]

Due to the popularity of Godot v3.x, there is actually a lot of resources around internet linking to the /latest docs meaning /v3x_latest. As there was quite radical change in the docs structure as well as to API, a lot of dead links is now spread everywhere.
My suggestion is to rather modify the url structure to something like:
/latest - meaning latest in 3.x branch
/4/latest - meaning latest in 4.x branch

It would be really unfortunate for the LTS version of Godot to lose many of the useful information.

Thinking about it further, it might be beneficial to actually get rid of the /latest alias completely and always put the particular version into the url. This will make sure, the publicly shared links will always link to the same information.

[YuriSizov]

@ohin latest hasn't been related to 3.x for several years at this point. Perhaps you mean stable?

As for a different structure, then it has been applied to the 3.x documentation as well several months ago (aside from a few very recent changes), with redirects put in place. So dead links would only mean there is no longer relevant page in the documentation.

[ohin]

Oh, sorry, yeah, then I meant stable (it has always been confusing to me).

So what do you think about getting rid of those aliases so that links will continue to work in the future? (of course this by itself will not fix the current problem, but will make sure this situation will not happend again)

To solve current situation I suggest leaving /stable for the 3.x stable branch.

[YuriSizov]

We have /stable so you can have a default URL for some stable documentation. Keeping it on 3.x is going to be problematic, as the latest stable version of Godot is 4.0, and 4.x is the branch that is going to be the main supported one going forward. Getting rid of it — I dunno, maybe. But this is only going to be a problem for a year or two; or maybe even less than that.

So I'd prefer improving the 404 page to give some guidance if you end up on it.