[pmwiki-users] off-topic: Behaviour of non-existiant home page (was: Nested groups)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Jun 3 07:50:10 CDT 2005


On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 12:12:24AM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> 
> The behavior is very confusing to me. Any unknown page should bring up 
> Main.PageNotFound which provides explicit instructions and choices to the 
> author. The current method makes it look like the page really did exist but 
> was empty.

As Hans has mentioned, there are a number of sites (including several
that I run) where the easiest way to create new pages is to simply
type the desired page name into the browser's address bar.  Adding a
PageNotFound indirection is likely to make people more confused.

> As for crawlers, Main.PageNotFound already generates <meta name='robots' 
> content='noindex,nofollow' />. Is that not enough?

Not really; <meta name='robots' ... /> is advisory, not mandatory.
Some crawlers don't honor (or properly recognize the tag), so it's
important that PmWiki doesn't generate pages that contain links to other 
derived page names that become pages that contain links to still more
derived page names that become pages that contain links to even more
derived page names ... when that happens, a crawler ends up never
leaving a site.  

I'm not saying that this would necessarily happen by increasing
the number of PageNotFound occurrences...I'm just saying that if we
make a switch I need to analyze it a bit more fully to make sure
that it doesn't happen.

Pm



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