Confusing dashboard links

[CasperWA]

ah, ok, adding 'v1/links' to the url works (but then the link in the dashboard should point to something more informative? or just be the base_url string, not a clickable link...)

Originally posted by @migueldiascosta in Materials-Consortia/providers#74 (comment)

This is from a new contributor to the providers repository.
I agree that this should be more intuitive and try to point to the latest versioned URL + endpoint where possible.

[ml-evs]

My only issue with changing the links in the dashboard is that some providers may have more informative "landing pages" hosted at those URLs. The main problem occurs when these base URLs 404 without any useful error message, which I think can largely be solved for the static index meta-db's with new redirect/better 404s (see linked issues).

[ml-evs]

I would say this is closed by Materials-Consortia/providers#77, though non-static index meta-databases have the right to serve whatever confusing stuff they want at their base URLs...

[CasperWA]

I would say this is closed by Materials-Consortia/providers#77, though non-static index meta-databases have the right to serve whatever confusing stuff they want at their base URLs...

Yeah, I wouldn't go that far.
I'd say this is a separate issue and we (as you also point out here) shouldn't rely on a nice landing page being present at these URLs.
I think instead we should consider adding some extra if/else cases for the URLs here? But personally, I'd prefer it to be pointing at the same location. But as an alternative it could try to request the URL, if a 404 or status code >= 400 is returned, it adds /v{major}/info to the URL or something similar?