When a laboratory closes, a project ends or a service is no longer offered, EPFL does not provide general guidelines as to the future destiny of the related website.
However, to avoid overloading the epfl.ch domain with obsolete data, we recommend archiving data that is no longer relevant.
When a website no longer needs updating, we offer the following options to users of our CMS (WordPress, Lamp …)
Searches on engines and links that point to deleted content generate a 404 error. Eventually, the content is no longer indexed.
It is possible to request the content of the site (html copy of the pages on a zip) for your personal files.
Please indicate on which site the old url should be redirected, in order to avoid 404 errors.
Be careful however with the fate of forward redirects (when the site is in turn revamped).
The content (or part of the content) is moved to another site by the concerned webmaster. He then provides a redirect list to [email protected].
It’s about taking the content out of the CMS, and storing it on a static site, archiveweb.epfl.ch.
The content remains online, for a very long time, visible to all. The urls are kept.
- Information is no longer indexed by search engines, but urls are retained.
- Archiving is a good solution, for example to keep track of a conference.
- It is no longer possible to modify the pages.
- Protected pages (intranet), unsaved modifications, draft pages, documents from file manager or unlinked media (not referenced on a page of the site) are not archived.
- If there are only absolute links on a document or image, these will not be archived.
- The site thus stored can however be deleted at any time (make the request to [email protected]).
Technical limitations of archiving a website
Our archiving system does not execute javascript (therefore does not archive dynamically loaded libraries) and does not rewrite links in js files and other script tags.
Attributes of type ‘data- *’ are not supported.
This is why some plugins, for example related to image galleries or image carousels, no longer work.