JoshuaZ is trying to restore that redirect again. I've been waiting for this for almost three weeks. On April 3 he told User:Prodego that he was planning to do this. I have already expanded the hostmask database from 26,000 lines to 33,000 lines in anticipation of this, but now I'm dusting off the IRC logs for January through April.

If the redirect goes through I will reinstall that old IRC search engine. This is not because IRC is interesting � indeed, compared to 2006 the #wikipedia IRC channel is almost tame these days. But it does give me an excuse to add about 700 HTML pages to Wikipedia-Watch. Based on past experience, this will double the overall traffic to my Wikipedia-Watch homepage.

That's because anytime you add 700 pages to a site, and these pages are filled with a wide variety of keyword-rich content that's interesting to web surfers, you get a lot more clicks once that content is indexed by search engines. Moreover, the two links in the footer of each page will go back to my homepage and to hivemind. These links help direct traffic from those who landed on an IRC chat page, and who find themselves wondering what they're looking at. That's a very common question, as you can imagine if you've ever seen about 600 consecutive lines of chat from #wikipedia on IRC. (These 700 files will average about 600 lines of chat each.)

The links in the footer also tend to give more Google juice to the two target pages, although not a whole lot because they're internal links. Do you know why every few words in Wikipedia articles are linked to another Wikipedia article? It's for the Google juice. Same thing here. (A lot of sites do this sort of thing just so that they have pages that can carry their Google ads, but I've never had any ads on any of my sites. I wonder if other sites will scrape my IRC logs? Google sure encourages a lot of pollution on the web, but then Wikipedia has never done anything to stop scrapers either.)

I'm actually looking forward to doing this if that redirect goes through. Wikipedia-Watch in general, and hivemind in particular, deserve more traffic. It's a quid pro quo because if the redirect is reinstalled, the PIR page in Wikipedia � the one with my name on it in seven places � will be getting more traffic too.