On 7/23/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
An explicit list of exemptions could reasonably grow to very large and it would need to be scanned for membership every time a page is parsed. I would be somewhat surprised if there were not >1000 meta-categories already. Go look at how __NOTOC__ works, that would be the most logical way of doing this in mediawiki. Thoughts?
Alright, we could insert something like this into the header templates used for non-content "meta" categories such as the examples I gave above.
Tracking down abuses need not be so tedious. If this __NOINDEX__ symbol adds the html which tells Google-bot to move on because there's nothing to see here... it could easily add some sort of visible confirmation (by user preference or javascript gadget or something) showing some kind of on/off-style symbol (NOT FAIR USE, not the stylized [G] favicon mind you...!) to indicate whether or not the page is indexed so you don't have to check the html manually.
—C.W.