diff --git a/.ci/publish.R b/.ci/publish.R
index 7d43a44e60..a07a4ce906 100644
--- a/.ci/publish.R
+++ b/.ci/publish.R
@@ -163,7 +163,7 @@ r.ver <- function(x) {
   v = tmp[3L]
   if (identical(v, "rel")) "r-release"
   else if (identical(v, "dev")) "r-devel"
-  else if (identical(v, "old")) "r-oldrel"
+  else if (identical(v, "old") || identical(v, "ancient")) "r-oldrel"
   else {
     if (grepl("\\D", v)) stop("third word in test job name must be rel/dev/old or numbers of R version")
     paste0("r-", paste(strsplit(v, "")[[1L]], collapse="."))