[PUT ON HOLD] Old Guide URLs containing ‘guides.instructure.com’ are finally retiring

[Renee_Carney]

Tl;dr: All guides will remain accessible via the Community but we need to close down a really old secondary guides site.

What is changing?

On Monday August 8, 2022 old guide URLs containing ‘guides.instructure.com’ will be taken offline. 

Will this change impact me? 

Most users access guides through the Community and will not notice a difference at all. Traffic to the ScreenSteps public sites continues to decrease monthly and is now a fraction of a percent of the monthly traffic to the Community.  These sites also do not appear in search engine results. 

You may be impacted if you linked to or embedded guides directly from the ScreenSteps site into courses or on resource web pages in the years we used Zendesk, or in the earlier years of using Jive (roughly pre 2017). We’ve provided a list of URLs below to aid in your link checks.

We plan to put redirects in place for sites, but not for individual guides. If you use an old 'guides.instructure.com' url to link to an individual guide you will want to find the appropriate link here, in the Community. Please reach out to us if you need assistance.

Why is this change happening? 

The old URLs point to a public ScreenSteps site. ScreenSteps is the software we have used to author and manage our documentation since 2011. It has been the one constant as we’ve changed Community platforms 3 different times (Zendesk > Jive > Khoros). In the Zendesk and Jive days we kept backups of our documentation public using ScreenSteps “sites” because Zendesk and Jive were not as reliable as Khoros is now. Both platforms also did not allow embedding of guides; Khoros will allow embedding within Canvas. (We do have hopes to expand embedding beyond Canvas in the future.) ScreenSteps was also kind enough to never charge us for these extra public sites.

With Khoros’ consistent uptime and ScreenSteps need to charge for public sites, we need to make our public ScreenSteps sites private. This will not impact access to guides on the Community!

URL Table

Title	ScreenSteps URL that will become private and redirect to community	Community URL that should be used
All Guides	https://guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/
Chinese	https://zh.guides.instructure.com/	Contains language characters
Danish	https://da.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Danske-Ressourcer-Danish/ct-p/danish
Dutch	https://nl.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Nederlandse-Bronnen-Dutch/ct-p/dutch_resources
French	https://fr.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Ressources-en-Fran%C3%A7ais-French/ct-p/french_guides
German	https://de.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Deutsche-Ressourcen-German/ct-p/german_resources
Norwegian	https://no.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Norske-Ressurser-Norwegian/ct-p/norwegian_resources
Portuguese	https://pt-br.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Recursos-em-Portugu%C3%AAs-Portuguese/ct-p/portuguese_resources
Spanish	https://es.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Recursos-en-Espa%C3%B1ol-Spanish/ct-p/espanol_resources
Swedish	https://sv.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Svenske-Resurser-Swedish/ct-p/swedish_resources
Thai	https://th.guides.instructure.com/	Contains language characters
Welsh	https://cy.guides.instructure.com/	https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Adnoddau-Cymreig-Welsh/ct-p/welsh_resources

[Jeff_F]

Hello @Renee_Carney  - might I inquire if will be possible to apply a domain level redirect so that all pages that are contained within 'guides.instructure.com' redirect to 'community.instructure.com'? That way if there is a link such as this used ( http://guides.instructure.com/m/4212/l/64908-how-do-i-submit-a-turnitin-assignment ) the redirect will take the user to the Community home page and they will not see a 404 error.

One approach could be to ask the vendor to access their DNS manager with their site host. These typically have a domain forwarding setting.  Or an .htaccess file could be added to the server.

I bring this up as we have nearly 200 templates and hundreds of active courses that each still have one or several pages that make use of such guides.instructure links. With a major term start on Monday (8/8/ we simply do not have time to update all of these.

Thanks!

[Renee_Carney]

.Hi @Jeff_F . I'm inquiring with our DNS manager on this as we speak. It is my goal that we do this very thing.

[Renee_Carney]

Great News, @Jeff_F 

We have those redirects set up and ready to go on August 8th. 

[Renee_Carney · Accepted solution]

We have put the planned redirect and closure of guides.instrucutre.com URLs on hold for the time being. Everything was on schedule until we discovered this week that links our guides offered in languages other than English were not being mapped to Community URLs and were instead using the old links.  We need to team up with our Community and translation vendors to develop a solution before we can make this change.