Aaargh. What Rose said, in spades.
The changeover to the new format is wonderful, but it has meant that all sorts of tricks that worked under the old system don't seem to work now. (And yes, Clive, the ROBOTS tags did actually work until the switch, even if in theory they weren't supposed to. That didn't mean that things didn't sometimes get snagged anyway. There were backdoor vulnerabilities. If someone used the "Print Thread" or "Quote" button, and left the resulting window open long enough when the robots were around, then the text would indeed be scooped--the only thing protected was the main thread page as seen on the board. And no, there were never any illusions on that score. All of this has been discussed, in detail, at various times over the last year.)
Anyway, bloody hell, nothing seems to work now. Check out, for example, December's "Deck the Halls" threads on Distinguished Guest, and look at what has happened to all of Sharon's beautiful decorative efforts. Gone. And worse, the ROBOTS tags which protected the texts are gone too. This means that people who submitted their work for the event on the understanding that it would be kept away from the spiders' eyes are out of luck. All is now wide open.
So, yep, there's a problem. And really, the only way to fix that problem is for Alex to insert ROBOTS tags into the <head> coding of the board pages themselves. That is, after all, how it's supposed to be done. Our quick'n'dirty cheat method may have worked in the past, but it really doesn't now. (Shaun, the META tags coding should be invisible; if you can see it on the "finished" posted page--like in your post above--that means it isn't working. And hiding it by colouring it white won't make a lick of difference to the search engines.)
Can we, collectively, come to some kind of agreement about this? The whole board doesn't have to be made invisible, but the workshop forums shouldn't be vulnerable to prying editors, and it should always be an option for anyone convening a special event (a Bakeoff, a Deck the Halls, etc.) to make its pages invisible too. In fact, it's even more vital for the special events; a workshop thread is eventually deleted, and when the search engines return after a few months for a refresher and fail to find it, they unlist the page and delete the cache. (Otherwise every other link on Google would be a 404 error eventually.) But special events threads are up to stay--and worse, the contributors have no editing access to their own material, since it is posted under someone else's name. Unless we can fix this problem, I can see it having a real chilling/killing effect on many of the events that make the Sphere such a lively place. If posting a poem here means rendering it ineligible for publication or prizes elsewhere down the road, then people will simply stop participating. The better the poem, the more the poet will hesitate to share it. That's got it exactly backwards, no?
Posting a poem on Eratosphere for critique or conversation is not publication. But if Google and Co. can find it and make it accessible across the Web with a simple keyword search, well, that won't make much difference, will it. Eratosphere is open to all, and that's a good thing. By all means, let's keep the main page available to the search engines. There, they can google up such useful keywords as: workshop, poetry, verse, critique, metrical, non-metrical, serious writing, translation, literary criticism etc. etc. etc. More than enough to advertise what we do here so that people looking for a great online workshop experience can find us. Everything else, the search engines can keep their noses out of.
Can we please fix this problem?
Last edited by Stephen Collington; 02-01-2009 at 05:01 AM.
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