Documentation Older version of Vray

[Vizioen]

It's a bit a shame that the documentation on the older versions of Vray isn't readily available anymore on the documentation website and I have to download it (1.8GB?) I wonder what the thought process is behind that?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

There are several reasons behind this decision.

1. It's an industry trend. If you check the documentation of other companies you will find out that they are also keeping the latest version available only.
2. Search engines rank the old version much higher than the new version, and very often the the rank does not change for a very long time. Many of the users are reaching the documentation from the search engine results, hence all of those will open the previous version without even noticing it. The search engine providers does not provide a solution to set the rank of the old-documentation lower. As long as we have only one version of the documentation this is not an issue, we also do not lose the ranking from the previous version which usually happens when we have a newer version available on the website.
3. Many resources over the internet, including this forum have posted links to the older version of the documentation, so again users are redirected to outdated version of the documentation. As long as we have only one version of the documentation this is not an issue.
4. Often users are confused when they see multiple version of the documentation available on the website.
5. The biggest consumers of the documentation are the new users, those users almost always use the latest version of the software.
6. .... the list doesn't stop here

We haven't removed the old version of the documentation, it's still there for everyone to download it and use it. There are lot of drawbacks for us however to keep it online. We have looking for many different solutions to those drawbacks but so far this is the only solution that resolves all of the issues we are facing. If you could suggest other solution that would help us to resolve the above issues, we'll be happy to hear it.

[bardo]

Just as suggestion.
I think that Blender uses a nice way to save the manuals of all the versions.
they have menu where you can access to the different version


Also Unity have a similar system

Anyway the reasons posted are quite understandable.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Thanks for the details, we'll have a look at the suggestions and we'll see if we could do something similar.