Privacy on this site

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steveindenmark

Legendary Member
I recently wrote a short review of a sleeping bag on this site. Today I googled the make and model of the sleeping bag and my CC review came up in the search engine.

I was surprised as I thought this was a closed group. How can I prevent my CC posts becoming available to the public.
 
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User6179

Guest
How I prevent my CC posts becoming available to the public

I don't think you can.
 
OP
OP
steveindenmark

steveindenmark

Legendary Member
I don't think you can.

The site needs to be searchable to be bring the traffic and advertising that Shaun needs to keep it running. I suspect the only answer is don't post what you don't want to be found.

Edited for typo
I think so too. Obviously, there was nothing private in the review. I was just suprised to see it.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
I think so too. Obviously, there was nothing private in the review. I was just suprised to see it.
CC gets a lot of attention from Google. I came up with a bodge fix for a bug in the mapping software that I use and made use of CC's Google-fu to get my bodge to #1 in the Google results!

At least it is #1 for me - I would be interested to hear if it is the same result for you in Denmark ... If you search for 'memory map grey squares bug' do you get my thread on CC as the #1 result?
 

lazybloke

Considering a new username
Location
Leafy Surrey
At least one page is only visible if you have logged-in
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
That's a yes from Glasgow. (On Google, Yahoo and Bing)
A searchtastic result! :laugh:

As you can see from the first post in that thread, I deliberately introduced various alternative terms to increase the likelihood of the search engines understanding what my post was about.

Before I posted that fix, it was actually not possible to find a fix online. Lots of people were looking for an answer and not finding it. Fellow CCer @robgul was one of them.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
I was surprised as I thought this was a closed group. How can I prevent my CC posts becoming available to the public.
The 'Personal Matters' forum is only available to CC members who are logged in. I just searched for a quote from one of my posts in that forum and Google could not find it.

The only other ways is to restrict your audience to selected members by creating a 'Conversation' (PM) group.
 
Good afternoon,

In the past I have written web crawlers, programs that look at web sites and these were good ones that obey a file called robots.txt, many bad ones don't.

The cyclechat robots.txt is;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /find-new/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /goto/
Disallow: /posts/
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /admin.php
Allow: /

User-agent: BoardReader
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://www.cyclechat.net/sitemap.php

The lines

User-agent: *
and
Allow: /

are a public statement that any automated tool such as a search engine is actively given permission to read urls such as

https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/privacy-on-this-site.249843/

the url of your post

unless the site is one of the

User-agent: .........
Disallow:
pairs

I understand that you may be surprised but permission to read the site with a tool such as a search engine has explicitly been given by the site owner.

This is not a legal grey area, someone has created a file that says "yes it is okay for a robot to read these pages" :-)

Bye

Ian

Edit: It is possible that there may be an error in the file and

Disallow: /posts/

may be intended to say

Disallow: /threads/
 
Last edited:

Pale Rider

Legendary Member
My usual advice: don't type anything into the computer you would not be prepared to see on the front page of the Sun.
 
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