Technical Notes, Special custom features of the board Options

[Somey]

In response to a suggestion by none other than Mr. Daniel Brandt, I've just added a new META tag to the board's global headers, to help prevent the unwanted caching of Wikipedia Review discussion threads and posts that have been deleted or (more likely) moved into non-public forums.

This should begin to take effect immediately, and will become increasingly noticeable over the next 2-3 weeks, as existing search engine caches are cleared to (hopefully!) respect the new tag. Within a month or so, there should be few, if any, "cache" links remaining next to WR page listings in Google and other caching search engines.

We're sorry if this causes any inconvenience for, well... let's just say "certain people"! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

Someday I also hope to make it possible to prevent crawling of individual threads, or even individual posts - and if feasible, the automatic substitution of specific character strings in posts for crawlers only, based on internal BBCode tags. (These ideas are similar to suggestions I and others have made to reduce the "search engine footprint" of specific "attack" pages on Wikipedia.)

However, those innovations (unlike this one) will have considerably greater overall impact, and will therefore not be implemented without discussion in advance.

Thanks!

[Somey]

May 23, 2010: There seems to have been a SQL write error in the forum_posts table, which as the name would indicate is the one containing all the posts, thereby making it the most important table in the whole database. This also happened while I was on vacation in a place with spotty internet service, and a certain amount of panic was involved because I hadn't made a database backup in several days... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif)

Luckily, the handy MySQL "Repair" feature seems to have cleared it up without much fuss or bother. But I can't guarantee that one or more posts from Sunday the 23rd (and possibly the previous night) weren't lost. If you find that one of your posts from this period is missing, please post it again - we weren't trying to censor you or anything nasty or evil like that.

As for my so-called vacation, it's still (sort of) ongoing, but I do intend to check more often over the next week or so, except for possibly Wednesday/Thursday (May 26/27). Not that you really need to know that, I just didn't want you all to think I was trying to "disappear" or whatever.

Thanks for your patience and understanding! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)