"All today's stories" links

[bryophyta]

The 'topics' bar at the bottom of fronts pages is made up of two parts.

• The 5 most popular (non-section) keyword tags in the stories contained on that front (this is implemented in #7101)
• Sometimes there is also an All today's stories link at the beginning of the list (highlighted below).

Status quo for "All today's stories"

Generally speaking, for a tag or section page the allPath link should link to the non-editionalised front which displays all stories in that tag or section, e.g. All today's stories on the uk/lifeandstyle front will link to lifeandstyle/all.

The allPage URL is not defined in the CAPI or facia-press models, so Frontend uses a heuristic to find the relevant path.

Current heuristic for generating an 'allPath'

Roughly: if the page id matches the section id of at least one tag belonging to a curated story in that page, then remove the edition (if any) from the page id and add '/all' to the end of it.

e.g. uk/lifeandstyle -> lifeandstyle/all

This won't always yield a path. If it doesn't, then Frontend tries to find a path ending in '/all' in one of the treats on the front. (This is how the allPath for the /uk front gets determined.)

Issues/Questions

• Is the allPath functionality in Frontend currently working as intended? (the /uk front's All today's stories link goes to tone/letters/all -- drawn from a treat on the front -- which is unlikely to be what users would expect).
• More generally, what is the intended functionality for this link?
  • Worth noting that there don't appear to be tests for this functionality, and we haven't been able to find documentation of the original intention yet.
  • Navigation/discovery is a good aim, but from preliminary exploration it looks like these links get very little traffic (e.g. ~20 clicks per day on the UK front).
  • SEO has been mentioned a few times; do we know how to clarify its role in SEO?
• UX may be looking into this in the near future, although no specific work is planned.
• Do we need to migrate this over to DCR as part of the 1% test? If we're unsure, how can we find out the information needed to make a decision?

[jamesgorrie]

Do we need to migrate this over to DCR as part of the 1% test?

I would say no given the usage of this component.

Is the allPath functionality in Frontend currently working as intended?

It's a good question - but we do have an expected way for it to work, which we can port over to TS pretty easily with tests which would put us in a much better position to work with UX.

do we know how to clarify its role in SEO?

It allows search engines to reach fewer deadends and make more connections between our content. So it should boost juice to the pages linked. The whole site is like this so we should try to maintain this linkability.

[bryophyta]

we do have an expected way for it to work, which we can port over to TS pretty easily with tests which would put us in a much better position to work with UX.

This makes a lot of sense!

Do we need to migrate this over to DCR as part of the 1% test?

I would say no given the usage of this component.

That seems reasonable to me; I'll remove the 1% milestone and make sure it's in the 'next steps' list for Fronts migration.

[jamesgorrie]

I think the conclusion here is:

If the front is overriding a tag page we link through to /{tag}/all. This includes editionalisation.

e.g. /{?edition}/commentisfree -> /commentisfree/all

If the front is the edition front, it goes through to the relevant tag:

• /uk -> /uk-news/all
• /us -> /us-news/all
• /au -> /australia-news/all
• /international -> /world/all

[rhiannareechaye]

Hi all - I think this has been resolved so wondering if I can close this ticket 'as not planned' @jamesgorrie @bryophyta

[bryophyta]

Hi all - I think this has been resolved so wondering if I can close this ticket 'as not planned' @jamesgorrie @bryophyta

As far as I can tell it looks like #7947 fixes a separate issue, which just concerns trending topics links. When we migrated the topics links over to DCR we bracketed this 'all stories' link as something to migrate separately. @DanielCliftonGuardian may know more than me though about what's happened since I was on the team?

fwiw my 2 cents is that it would be worth trying to gauge how important this 'all stories' link is from an SEO perspective, because it wasn't clear to me that it pays its way otherwise, as recreating in DCR is likely to add non-trivial extra complexity. (I tried to outline this reasoning in the issue description, but happy to elaborate if it'd be useful.)

[DanielCliftonGuardian]

Hi all - I think this has been resolved so wondering if I can close this ticket 'as not planned' @jamesgorrie @bryophyta

As far as I can tell it looks like #7947 fixes a separate issue, which just concerns trending topics links. When we migrated the topics links over to DCR we bracketed this 'all stories' link as something to migrate separately. @DanielCliftonGuardian may know more than me though about what's happened since I was on the team?

fwiw my 2 cents is that it would be worth trying to gauge how important this 'all stories' link is from an SEO perspective, because it wasn't clear to me that it pays its way otherwise, as recreating in DCR is likely to add non-trivial extra complexity. (I tried to outline this reasoning in the issue description, but happy to elaborate if it'd be useful.)

Thanks @bryophyta, this still hasn't been implemented and I am not aware of any decision or analysis that has taken place that suggests we remove this feature so we should still look at how we wish to prioritise the issue.

[paperboyo]

Personally, and given excellent description and thoughts here, I would implement it everywhere, even more so because its functionality (the only way to get to an underlying tag page of an editionalised front) is only available via manually (!) curated treat which is a) desktop-only (sic!) and b) may go away with Fairground…