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Consider excluding crawlers by default

Open
#852 4 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js
Domain
backend, web-dev

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. First clarify whether crawler exclusion should be the default and how users would opt in through a dashboard or app, then inspect the server's pod-serving behavior. Done means an agreed policy and an implementation plan that accounts for the privacy and discoverability trade-off.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Anecdotally, we have had a number of users complain about their name and email address being made available to spiders. This could be done by adding a robots.txt file to a pod.

Solid, being a privacy first framework, should consider excluding crawlers by default.

It would be relatively easy subsequently to turn it on via a dashboard, or an app.

The downside to the approach is that an adoption vector of finding people via search engine is lost. And ability to create a social graph.

I'm personally unsure on the trade off here.

Good idea / Bad idea / Thoughts?

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
1.8k
Forks
308
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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