Thanks for the feedback. This has been passed on to our web team.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Blocking robot access to certain directories and file types is an industry standard practice. The primary means for this is the robots.txt file. Compliance with the standard is the norm, although it is voluntary.  Robots.txt is an ASCII text file located in the website root.  It can be lengthy, but it is typically short and simple. Here is a brief blurb on this.  You don't need to be an NSA hacker to view or edit this file. There is nothing mysterious about it.

This is the robots.txt file for this forum. Notice that only the Alexabot robot is disallowed from indexing PrintTopic. All other robots are free to do as they wish. Notice also that no asterisks are used in the Alexabot PrintTopic exclusion. It might be more effective if it was written as described in the above Moz blurb.
:doze:


"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

Printing and/or caching pages is the feature of many forums. At the very top of every thread, here at this forum, if you click "options", it would drop-down 3 links and "Print this Topic" is one of them. 
That is what getting crawled and indexed by bots. Everything started with "Print" should be excluded from indexing. 
On the other hand, users information cannot be reached by any bot, since it is stored in database and only retrieved, when client starts a session by supplying ID and password.

A search reveals many PrintTopic entries on Google, not just from the RL forum. So it seems to be a "feature" of Google's indexing bot.

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I would be surprised if there is any webmaster around. Forum has number of problem pointed out hundreds of times. I am not going to repeat as it is really pointless.

I see there's been no improvement in this condition. I have to say, this reflects poorly on the webmaster.


"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

The webmaster controls which files may be indexed by the bot and which may not. If this weren't true, all your vulnerable configuration files would be indexed on Google. It would be a security disaster. :Whistling:


"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

I also had this several times...


Toystorylab on Vimeo :     Crassitudes (my "Alter Ego") on Youtube: 

It can be easily fixed.


"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

Annoys me too...


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