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]

We seem to have suffered a number of outages this weekend, including one just a few minutes ago - but I still don't have a definitive answer as to why they've been occurring, I'm afraid.

It's possible we were attacked by a botnet, or spammers, or Republicans - something of that nature, but I don't think so. I'm not seeing the usual signs of that sort of thing on the back-end or in the database - mind you, I'm not a professional web security expert, but I've played one on TV a few times. Unfortunately, we're on cheap/shared/third-party hosting here, so people could be attacking any number of sites that are using the same servers as us, and we'd have no way of knowing.

I'll see what I can find out tomorrow, but I expect it will probably end up being something pretty mundane. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)