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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 123 responses total. |
scg
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response 7 of 123:
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Jun 7 03:44 UTC 2000 |
I supported anonymous reading too, but I don't support having the conferences
indexable by search engines. Once somebody has stumbled on Grex's
conferences, I'm happy to have them reading these items in context. I feel
very differently about having some random Grex item or set of Grex items be
what pops up on a search engine when somebody does a search for my name.
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jmsaul
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response 8 of 123:
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Jun 7 03:52 UTC 2000 |
I'm with the last three responders. I don't think this is a good thing to
do to people who entered stuff on the expectation that search engines can't
read it.
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gelinas
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response 9 of 123:
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Jun 7 04:08 UTC 2000 |
I'm against the idea of indexing. I still get spammed from old usenet
postings; I don't need that from grex, too.
Not to mention that it violates the expectations: what's here is here and no
where else.
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gypsi
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response 10 of 123:
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Jun 7 12:54 UTC 2000 |
There is a reason I use a pseudo in some items... That way nobody can
search by name or attribute it to me.
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jmsaul
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response 11 of 123:
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Jun 7 13:05 UTC 2000 |
Of course, not everyone has thought of that.
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cmcgee
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response 12 of 123:
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Jun 7 16:14 UTC 2000 |
I'd REALLY be upset if the search could be by name or login. I've got enough
stalking problems without that added breech.
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remmers
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response 13 of 123:
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Jun 7 16:15 UTC 2000 |
Technical question: With things as they are now set up, can we
prevent indexing by a sufficiently clever search engine?
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aaron
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response 14 of 123:
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Jun 7 17:47 UTC 2000 |
More likely, the indexing would be made by a stupid search engine. The
clever ones will heed instructions found in a robots.txt file, or a
noindex command embedded on a page.
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remmers
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response 15 of 123:
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Jun 7 17:53 UTC 2000 |
I meant "clever enough to ignore robots.txt and suchlike".
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remmers
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response 16 of 123:
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Jun 7 18:27 UTC 2000 |
Anyway, my point was that that there has never been a guarantee
that Grex conferences won't get indexed, just a reasonable
supposition that the major search engines won't do so directly
because they are known to follow certain rules. I think it could
happen indirectly, though. Someone could create a "rogue mirror
site" of Grex, modified in such a way the things that prevent
indexing by major search engines are not present. Then the
mirror site would get indexed by the major search engines.
I realize that this might not be legal to do, but that does not
mean that it wouldn't happen.
So in discussing this issue, people should keep in mind that
the most Grex can do is influence the likelihood that people's
responses here will or will not become web-searchable; Grex
can't guarantee that they won't.
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pfv
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response 17 of 123:
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Jun 7 18:42 UTC 2000 |
Sure they can: to be index and available means they have to
access 'em from the webside OR have a duplicate of the entire
system in another place.
Turn off the web, they can't reach it; enforce accounts, they
can't reach it; prosecute thieves, they won't copy it.
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scg
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response 18 of 123:
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Jun 7 19:16 UTC 2000 |
Yes, I'm aware that such indexing may happen. I just don't think we should
do anything to encourage it.
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gelinas
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response 19 of 123:
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Jun 7 19:51 UTC 2000 |
Re #10: doesn't work; even psuedonymous responses have our loginids recorded.
That's why I gave up on them after one test.
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janc
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response 20 of 123:
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Jun 7 21:35 UTC 2000 |
The major search engines are well-behaved and obey our gentle requests
not to index the conferences.
But not all robots are that polite. I've never seen any search engine's
spider go through the Grex conferences, but I have seem email address
collectors do so. It does tend to be somewhat hard on the internet
connection when this happens, though the more legitimate spiders tend to
me more careful about this too.
I don't have a strong opinion either way. I guess I agree that it would
be appropriate to open only new material to indexing, not old material.
Another possiblity would be to allow "item list" pages (which show the
titles of all the items in a conference) to be indexed in some
conference, but not the actual items themselves.
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davel
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response 21 of 123:
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Jun 8 01:33 UTC 2000 |
Re #19 re #10: I took her to mean that she created a pseudo account & used
that to respond on certain items. Certainly using the "pseudo" command to
at the respond-or-pass prompt is not anonymous, but I'd say most people use
it only to use the fullname field to say something. Possibly I'm wrong.
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orinoco
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response 22 of 123:
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Jun 8 02:58 UTC 2000 |
resp:5 -- Jan suggests that it would be possible to limit which items a
search engine would be encouraged to inedex. Presumably that means that we
could continue discouraging them from indexing items entered before a certain
date, in order to protect people who entered stuff before the policy change.
That said, I still don't think that encouraging search engines would be a good
idea.
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janc
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response 23 of 123:
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Jun 8 03:11 UTC 2000 |
I think by a judicious combination of mod_rewrite and writing custom
Backtalk scripts, it would be possible to implement just about any rules
you can think of for what is and is not allowable to index. I could
also set things up so that only a select list of search engines may
index things, or so different search engines are allowed to index
different things. Let your imaginations run wild.
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gypsi
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response 24 of 123:
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Jun 8 14:44 UTC 2000 |
Re #21 - both my full name and cf pseudo are true pseudos. If people know
my login, oh well. They'll still see that "gypsi" belongs to "Groovy
Birdy". =) For a LONG time, I was using a completely different last name.
The only reason I changed it was because I know a lot of grexers in real
life now, and it gets confusing when they try to look me up or whatnot.
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remmers
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response 25 of 123:
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Jun 8 17:59 UTC 2000 |
Re #17: Heh. Turning off the web would be a "the operation was
successful but the patient died" kind of remedy.
(This discussion reminds me that I was responsible for the first
mini-controversy over this issue. A few years ago, before
Backtalk, I wrote a program to convert Picospan items to HTML.
My idea was to use this as a convenient way of archiving old
conferences. When I proposed this in Coop, people objected
because of the search engine indexing issue. At that time I
wasn't well-acquainted with the techniques for preventing it,
and I don't think the objectors were either.)
<end parenthetical aside, back to the subject at hand>
One way to go would be to this on a conference-by-conference
basis, with the decision left to the conference participants,
and in no case index older material retroactively.
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pfv
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response 26 of 123:
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Jun 8 18:11 UTC 2000 |
Actually, I would think that:
1) nothing before acceptance was indexable;
2) Items should be flagged as indexable and ANNOUNCED at reply;
3) The current "Ok to enter this response?" garbage would go
another step - "You know this item is web-indexable?".
Personally, I see absolutely zero advantage to grex OR mnut ever
being as stupid as to allow their confs/items/resp being
indexable. HOWEVER - I can see a local "index" that does a
"find.." on a grand-scale. particularly from the webside, since
the concept of a "hyperlink" in picospan is impossible.
I can even see such an invaluable capability being "member-only"
in hopes of gaining even further fundage..
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scg
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response 27 of 123:
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Jun 8 18:12 UTC 2000 |
My guess is that such a change would have a pretty serious chilling effect
on the conversations here. I'd certainly think very carefully before posting
anything here that was likely to become the first thing anybody would find
out about me, doing a search of the entire web.
Now that I think about it, though, letting the web search engines loose on
the conferences would have an effect far beyond making the conferences easily
searchable. If somebody wanted to find actual information about anybody who
posted a lot of stuff on Grex, or anybody whose name was used as a pseudo by
somebody who posted lots of stuff on Grex, the volume of the Grex conferences
would be massive enough that finding the real information would be pretty much
impossible.
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pfv
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response 28 of 123:
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Jun 8 18:30 UTC 2000 |
The latter does absolutely zilch to reassure me.
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gull
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response 29 of 123:
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Jun 9 19:54 UTC 2000 |
I don't like the idea, simply because I've seen what a deep search by a web
spider does to a web site. Even indexing of a relatively simple site will
almost totally shut that site down for a while, if it's on a 56K modem. I
think the affect of a web-bot indexing thousands of responses would be
devestating to Grex's bandwidth.
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mdw
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response 30 of 123:
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Jun 10 00:17 UTC 2000 |
The smarter indexing engines pace themselves so they don't chew up all
the bandwidth to a site.
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janc
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response 31 of 123:
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Jun 10 04:13 UTC 2000 |
(After all, if you are indexing the whole web, you can just as well work
on 2000 different sites at once, so each one is being hit by only one in
2000 of the queries you make, so no one site is being hammered hard.
It's not hard to do, costs you little, and avoids getting you hated by
every site on the net. I'm just assuming that reputable search engines
would do something like this.)
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