2008/7/25 Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com:
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:07 PM, wjhonson@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__ .