Agricultural Communications Redirect Policy

This policy will apply to all new redirect requests beginning October 1, 2018.

For all existing redirects we maintain, a 30-day advanced notification of the phase out process will be communicated to site contact and/or technical support personnel. The phasing out process will take place between October 1, 2018-July 1, 2019.

Effective date: October 1, 2018

Justification

The Agricultural Communications Computing and IT Section and Web Group are routinely asked to create or keep old website urls in use in the form of automatically redirecting these old addresses to a new address that has been adopted. This also can include creating website aliases and multiple DNS names for a host. Both groups recognize the importance of having a website address that is both easy to remember and meets any standard naming convention that we have in place. However, maintaining old and new site urls for each website as a long-term solution can create several problems for those searching for current and relevant information about our websites.

Possible Caveats when Using Redirects Indefinitely

1. When these redirects are kept in place, Google search and other search indexes are never updated with the new, correct site address
2. The ability to maintain these workarounds become more difficult as time passes and our hosting environment undergoes upgrades and growth
3. This creates a high likelihood of errors occurring due to sometimes redirecting for more than one “hop”.

Standards

Below are the guidelines that must be met before agreeing to put a redirect in place for an existing M-G CAFE site.

• Redirects from previous website urls to new urls are only put in place when absolutely necessary and only when a specific timeframe set which will be a standard of 3 months. The redirects are not renewable or extendable. This will be set to less than 3 months when possible.
• If no other timeframe has been set or we no longer have contact information for a site maintainer, the redirect will always expire within 6 months of the new site, alias or DNS becoming “live”
• One for one redirects cannot always be achieved effectively. In these cases, a redirect for the entire site will be put in place at the root or main level of the site
• Exceptions may be necessary for print and publications that list an old site address. We will work with each entity to correct these items as soon as possible and then will continue the phase out process of the old address
• We do have a standard in place for naming new sites within the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. This standard is based on the *.ca.uky.edu url structure for content management sites (Drupal) and *named-app.ca.uky.edu for application specific sites (such as NEP, Patim, etc.)
• We do have a standard in place for naming new staging and development sites within the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. This standard is based on the *.stg3.uky.ag (staging) and *.dev3.uky.ag (development) structure.

External domain name registrations and hosting (those not managed by Agricultural Communications):

• We do not purchase domain name registrations for users. We recommend using the adopted naming standard of *.ca.uky.edu which means the site will be hosted by us and the domain name and dns address is maintained and provided by Ag Communications, UKITS and their DNS servers
• Though it is not recommended, if a CAFE user or department, section or entity has purchased a domain name and has files hosted with an external host, we will work with them to forward their existing CAFE site to this domain name. We request that such actions be communicated to the Web Group and Systems Group before purchase to ensure such redirects can be achieved. These requests will be handled on a case by case basis.
  • The CAFE user, department, section or entity should be aware of and adhere to the University of Kentucky web policy standards found here: http://webgov.uky.edu/standards/
• Though it is not recommended, if a CAFE user or department, section or entity has purchased a domain name and wants that name redirected to an existing CAFE website that we host, we will provide them with the information needed to point their external domain name to their CAFE hosted site. However, the purchaser of the domain name will be responsible for updating this information via their domain name registrant. We request that such actions be communicated to the Web Group and Systems Group before purchase to ensure such redirects can be achieved. These requests will be handled on a case by case basis.
• We require up to date contact information for the domain registrant and site maintainer as well as notification when these domain names and redirects are no longer needed or are no longer in use.
• We will not place a redirect from a new site to an old existing site page that is not being maintained and updated
• We will maintain a current list of all site redirects, aliases and domain names specific to website hosting that we maintain and include information pertaining to the date requested, removal date and contact information
• We will strive to maintain a list of any known external host domain names when this information is communicated to us
• Website maintainers will be notified 30 days prior to removal of any existing redirects and again on the date of removal
• All redirects can be revoked or removed at any time per CAFE Web Group, Agricultural Communications Director or the Dean of CAFE.