Deprecated exercise page misrepresents status

Exercism Building Exercism
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Building off the discussion in Deprecated parallel-letter-frequency exercise still visible by URL, the website shows deprecated exercises as locked when accessed directly by URL.

This exercise is currently unavailable for you to start. Complete the following exercises to unlock Parallel Letter Frequency or disable learning mode.

However, there are two related issues here for deprecated exercises.

  1. The text indicates a deprecated exercise is unlockable. An deprecated exercise is only available if a student had started it before it was deprecated. You can’t start an exercise after it was deprecated so this is misrepresenting the situation.

  2. This message shows up for deprecated exercises even for tracks that don’t have syllabi. Without a syllabus, there wouldn’t be a learning mode to disable. Also practice exercises are locked only if they have prerequisite concepts not met. So a track like Pyret has all exercises unlocked since it doesn’t have a syllabus.

For deprecated exercises, the website should not specify potentially incorrect ways to unlock it. Something like this should be generic enough for deprecated exercises, but this would certainly involve Exercism staff so we should workshop this beforehand.

This exercise is currently unavailable for you to start. It has been removed by the track maintainer.

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“currently” sounds like it is temporarily unavailable. I’d reword it to sound more finite:

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Thanks, I was being a bit vague since a maintainer could technically un-deprecate an exercise. However, I’m not aware of anybody actually doing that so your wording is better.

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I think the revised wording is good — it makes clear that for new students, starting the exercise isn’t an option. And it won’t show for those who have completed or started the exercise.

As for un-depricating an exercise, I have seen it in a few scenarios. I may have even done it for the Python track. But unless someone has been paying close attention to the track, the exercise simply … goes active again. I don’t think that’s going to cause too much consternation, unless I am missing something. :smile:

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