DiS on Google / Other Search Engines

[froglet]

Xylo has been in touch, what solution were you thinking of?

[sean]

@froglet

Xylo has been in touch, what solution were you thinking of?

Anonymising or hiding old posts and porting the username to a new account? Trying to remember what someone did previously

[froglet]

We did offer to delete the posts and keep the account but xylo felt it was safest to start afresh. I felt simply anonymising the account probably wouldn’t do the trick as xylo is worried he’s posted enough to link the account to him

[ksgtof]

Can you do the same for me @moderators ? Thanks.

Also you should have fixed the home page saying “site closed” which comes through in the Google summary way before this.

Bye.

[froglet]

Hi, could you drop us a DM please? Thank you

[bugduv]

It’s not necessarily even just sharing personal stuff, but maybe something as simple as replicating a view or opinion or even just a rare turn of phrase on here and social media that might make someone more identifiable.

Might be worth having a proper word with the community about this one, especially given the wider political binfire. If the site needs to be a lot more searchable to pay the bills, perhaps we have to have the conversation about members supporting it again, with cost of living caveats, etc.

[zeal]

Just to put some context, this is very much it being fixed - some search engines (yes, including google), couldn’t crawl the boards, but many others could and have been.

If there’s a conversation about whether that’s desirable, then grand, but let’s not give people the impression that not appearing in Google was intentional and this is anything more than a fix.

[lyserge]

Mods might find it helpful to have this Discourse plugin installed, which lets admins flag individual threads as non-indexable to search engines:

GitHub - discourse/discourse-topic-noindex: discourse plugin to allow admins to remove...

[ksgtof]

Nope, don’t know know how

[sean]

@bugduv

If the site needs to be a lot more searchable to pay the bills

It’s not to pay the bills. There aren’t any ads on here. It’s perhaps more that the community is slowly getting smaller and very few new members have joined for years.

I wasn’t aware it wasn’t on Google and replied to the OP from another thread

[sean]

@ksgtof

Also you should have fixed the home page saying “site closed” which comes through in the Google summary way before this.

I’ve been trying to, it’s been hard to get one of the few coders who has access to make the changes required

Otherwise I need to find £500-1000 to onboard someone new to do it as they’d need to set up a Ruby on Rails deployment set up and get to grips with our archaic old site to make changes.

[sean]

@lyserge

Mods might find it helpful to have this Discourse plugin installed, which lets admins flag individual threads as non-indexable to search engines:

I think making all but the music forums forum private might make most sense - would require being signed in to see them

[lyserge]

Agreed, but you might also occasionally want to delist a music thread. e.g. I could see some of the discussion on the Radiohead thread drawing in people who want to stir shit up.

[sean]

@xylo

I can tell you that a modern board like this that leaves threads rolling for thousands of posts and never archives/deletes will chart incredibly well very, very fast, especially for niche hits. Which will raise the overall authority of the boards, which will push everything up.

I’ve been told it’s the opposite and Google massively downranks anything that’s a forum

[sean]

Started a thread which I’ll probably move to these boards in a few days

Making This Board “Private”

Hi All There’s been a discussion over on the Site Feedback board about making the non-music forums private “Private” means people can only read them if they’re logged in and some boards could also be limited to certain user trust level but that’s another thread for another day I reckon. The need to login should prevent search engines surfacing content from these threads Stop AI crawlers from “reading” or potentially with the rise of agentic AI posting (it’s how sites like 404Media stops AI …

[sean]

I’ve now put on trust level 0 to access the social and politics board. Will check there’s no issue before hiding sports (does that need to be private?) and entertainment (potentially a bit edgier and best to hide?)

[Avery]

Sorry if this has been asked before. Just for clarity, does that mean you need to have signed up and be trust level 0 to view those boards?

[sean]

@Avery

Sorry if this has been asked before. Just for clarity, does that mean you need to have signed up and be trust level 0 to view those boards?

Yes, it means you need to be logged in to see and engage with those threads

Hope it makes sense

We could make it so that it’s level 1 (which I think requires a few factors to move up to) but not sure we need to?

[Avery]

It sounds like level 0 is all that’s needed to avoid the Google bots. I can’t speak for anyone else but it feels like having extra trust levels for Social would be extra admin for users changing accounts, and new users getting the chance to engage immediately. We already have a few more secure parts of the boards. Thanks for putting this change in.