releases.ubuntu.com is unintentionally confusing for new users

[Thomas Mashos]

Issue:
While new users should be going to the main site rather than http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/ a google search for "ubuntu 16.04 download" will take them to the releases site. After a point release, the top half of this page is cluttered with text and links that are unintentionally obtuse. There exists 2 "Desktop Image" links for each arch and 3 "Server Image" links for each arch (as of 16.04.1) that all look identical unless you hover over the link (and even then, you've got to look close to notice the difference. All of the text in this top half is generic, so the only way to see the difference is by hovering over the link.

Proposed solution:
There's two possible fixes I see here.

1) Remove the top half of the page leaving just the directory listing of the files (I'm assuming this top half is automatically generated an ISO upload time)

2) Prevent Google (and I'm assuming other search engines) from showing releases.ubuntu.com in results. (I'm assuming if they can't crawl releases.ubuntu.com that the page would eventually expire out of the results) This would work as the alternative downloads page ( https://www.ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads ) links to the torrents and network installers, however it does not link to md5sums nor sha1sums.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

YES PLEASE :)

[Peter Mahnke (peterm-ubuntu)]

Thomas

I have contacted the team that maintains that site with your feedback. As soon as I know more, I will follow up.

Peter

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

The actual problem here is that there are duplicated links at all. There usually shouldn't be, and this was a byproduct of having two versions there where there shouldn't have been. I'm correcting this for 16.04 as we speak.

[Thomas Mashos (tgm4883)]

Adam,

That looks much cleaner, but how do people download a base 16.04 image now? For instance if they need the original (non HWE) kernal and xserver for some reason?