On sab, 2002-05-18 at 16:32, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Another reason to disallow bots access to history is because there often is copyrighted material in the history of pages that has since been removed from the current article version (it would be nice for an admin to able to delete just an older version of an article BTW).
I've been meaning to add this, but haven't gotten around to it yet. It'll go in with some other maintanence tools (for the ability to undelete something if necessary, and to find and reattach or dump "homeless" entries that may have somehow come loose in the database. Actually, those last two are the same ability.)
The edit links REALLY should NOT be allowed to be indexed by any bot:
Amen!
There could, of course, be a purely technical fix for this by having the software not recognize newly created blank or "Describe the new page here" pages as being real pages (a Good Idea BTW).
Good idea, and should be easy to do; I'll add this right away if there are no objections.
Links to older versions of articles and to history pages also sets-up would-be contributors into becoming labeled as "vandals" when trying to edit an older version -- thus turning them away forever.
Good point.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)