[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Searchability of non-mainspace pages

[Chad]

Well, if the entire project namespace were set to nofollow/noindex,
then it would certainly cut down on the individual requests for
specific pages.

As far as a NOINDEX magic word for the mainspace, I don't think this
is a good idea necessarily, I was just saying how it could be done.

-Chad

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:52 PM, Ryan <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > The way to do it would be to open a bugzilla request.
>  >
>  > -Chad
>  >
>
>  Right now, robots.txt excludes certain areas, including XfD, from external
>  search.  There are two problems with this:
>
>  1.  Internal search indexes them.
>  2.  Developers are forced to work on them on a case-by-case basis, which
>  takes a lot of time to work on.  For example, bug 13398, regarding
>  well-intentioned bot reports that tend to seem like nasty condemnations of
>  sites as "spammers", has been open for over a month, but there are many
>  other important bugs open, and so this and other robots.txt bugs have not
>  yet been fixed.
>
>  For the former problem, it seems fairly straightforward to have logged-out
>  users search only mainspace pages, either by default behavior of the search
>  box, or by banning them entirely from searching these pages.  Logged-in
>  users would retain their current defaults and ability to search user pages,
>  etc.
>
>  For the latter problem, I think the community needs to indicate that these
>  bugzilla requests are important, and should be handled much faster.  I have
>  concerns about blocking namespaces because of the possible affects on other
>  languages who'd rather not block these namespaces (because robots.txt works
>  globally), but frankly I think that a full block of other namespaces would
>  be a good idea, and should be considered on meta.
>
>  --
>  [[User:Ral315]]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>  foundation-l mailing list
>  foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>  Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>