On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:07 PM,
<wjhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
Considering as how this issue of noindexing
user-space and user-talk by default only seems an issue with a very small handful of
editors, I would think the community at-large, who has been having their space indexed for
years, would fall on the side of continuing withthe *least* amount of disruption to the
status quo.
??? That would be to no-index *on request* user pages and their associated talk pages,
project pages and their associated talk pages.? That is, the default would be, as it is
today, to index.? But a project or user can opt-in to not index.
I'd say a reasonable middle-ground would be to upgrade the software to
support __INDEX__ and __NOINDEX__ then give users a week or two to tag
the stuff they want indexed with __INDEX__ before flipping the noindex
switch on. This would allow us to keep indexing the useful stuff
without having to hunt down every userfied BLP and tag it. Also, new
userspace pages would be no-indexed by default, which seems like a
good thing to me.
With the amount of stuff that it is useful to index about the only
sane response to putting such a procedure in place would be to bot tag
everything with __INDEX__ .