Remove or modify unreleased versions from the drop down

[nik9000]

We just (#1447) removed non-"live" versions from the version drop down and @rjernst asked a great question:

Are the in flight versions something that confuse users as well?

I'm no sure to be honest. I love that we have master and 7.x in there because it invites the folks curious about the development process to explore it and, hopefully, be delighted about how open we are. But maybe it'd be worth removing them from the list. Or marking them (unreleased). Or something.

[lcawl]

I think that given that we now have "other versions" in the list (#1481), it's reasonable for users to find 7.x and master there too. In which case, the drop-down list would only contain the supported, released docs.

[debadair]

Yes, master and 7.x do cause some confusion--particularly master. Contributors generally understand our versioning model, but regular users don't necessarily make the connection between master and the next major version.

I do think there's value in surfacing upcoming/in-progress releases, but I worry that adding qualifying text to each entry would be too cluttered--especially at the top of the list. Maybe we could segment the drop-down? Something like:

I don't feel particularly strongly about it--if the consensus is that "Other versions" is sufficient for both future and past versions, that would be ok too.

[rjernst]

Perhaps instead of "All version" or "Other versions", we could have "Past versions" and "Unreleased versions". I like the idea of having it still easily findable, but very few people (and mostly just maybe plugin developers) need to find the unreleased version docs.

[debadair]

If we added headings for Unreleased and Past versions to the version link farm pages, we could do that.

I do think that the docs for the next release are of interest to more than just plugin developers--looking at the analytics, the most-viewed pages in 7.5 are the release notes and breaking changes.

Things get murkier for 7.x and master, and there's significantly more traffic to master than 7.x and 7.5 over the last month, which I suspect reinforces that people are ending up on master when that's not necessarily what they want. The numbers for future versions are tiny compared to current, though.

Total pageviews 11/1 - 11/27 (Elasticsearch Reference)
Current: 4,035,415
7.4: 589,331 [1]
7.5: 21,113
7.x: 48,251
Master: 214,576

[1] The "current" version is actually a separate copy of the current branch, current and 7.4 take you to different pages.

[gtback]

From @rwaight:

In order to improve navigation on the Elastic Stack and Product Documentation site, it would be helpful to put master into the other versions section of the navigation menu.

Currently the master version of the documentation is available in the main version menu on the site. This can cause confusion when reading about capabilities and configurations of currently available products, since the master version is preliminary documentation.