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Back in 2017, SE changed their meta URL hierarchy, so their URLs are no longer meta.site.stackexchange.com, but rather site.meta.stackexchange.com. While the Community user did a good job fixing all the links in questions and answers, ones in comments, pinned site notices (ex. "no professional advising" on sites like Judaism.SE, Law.SE, and MedSci.SE), and the help center (not to the exclusion of other locations that I've not yet discovered) still contain the old link.

However, the old link is completely broken; it doesn't redirect. Oddly enough, this doesn’t occur for the top-level URL: compare meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com with meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/q/1. Is it possible to fix these older links to redirect to their corresponding new URLs?

  • I suspect based on the fact that Community replaced all meta.site.* links in posts with site.meta.* links that it's difficult to set an auto-redirect on such URLs.
  • It's tedious to go through every comment on every site from before January 2017 and manually fix them.

One potential solution, then, would be for the powers that be to deal with per-site notices and the help center. As for comments, I know there's a way to search comment texts through SEDE; is there a way to use that to pull up every comment containing meta.site.* and then automate the moderator comment-edit tools to replace them all with their corresponding site.meta.* links? If not, is there another fairly innocuous way to fix these old links?

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    Do you have an example of a broken one? For example, meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com redirects as expected so I'm not quite understanding what the break is here - an example would help!
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 1:57
  • @Nick My mistake, I neglected to include that I’ve only seen this occur on pages within that domain, not on the top-level domain itself. Take, for example, meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com/q/1 – that one gives an “insecure connection” error.
    – DonielF
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 2:09
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    Gotcha - it sounds like you’re trying to hit those domains on https://, but that was never supported on those domains, and we can’t reasonably do so due to wildcard TLS certificates only supporting the left-most section for the wildcard. I wrote up why TLS support on the old domains isn’t reasonable here for more context: nickcraver.com/blog/2017/05/22/https-on-stack-overflow/…
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 2:48
  • @Nick I think I understand. So I take it that means redirects are impossible. Then is there a way to fix all the old links in comments and the like so that they’re usable without having to retype them?
    – DonielF
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 14:27
  • The comments should be using http:// (the only thing that ever worked), all of those should need no love. If a comment was made linking to https://, it never worked. As it stands, we redirect all the old http links, even though hosting certificates and offering https there is unreasonable...the redirects are maintainable :)
    – Nick Craver
    Commented Apr 4, 2020 at 0:30

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