DMOZ forum threads in Google search results

[maxboll]

It seems that ancient and long-silent DMOZ forum threads show up high on lots of Google search results. for instance old threads referring to status checks or other issues concerning domain names show up when you look for the domain name or just the name itself.
Is there any way of stopping this? It would be a good idea to stop Googlebots visiting all the DMOZ forums for several reasons, including a) the information that then shows up on Google is doubtless of no use to anyone except the webmaster of a rival company. b) it's old c) though forums are public, they are nothing like as public as a Google search, and there are things that people would not say (confidential things) on a DMOZ forum it they thought at the time that they were saying them out loud on Google.

I can see no reason for keeping DMOZ forum topics live ad vitam aeternam (for ever) and suggest that old site submission status forums, to start with, be deleted once they have had no posts for three months or six months. What justification can there be for keeping them any longer ?

 

[Sunanda]

Is there any way of stopping this?

That is a question for Google.

If Google's method of ranking SERPs is inaccurate, the best approach is for you to work with Google to correct their algorithms, rather than ask all the sites (I assume resource-zone is just one on your list) whose pages are riding too high on Google to delete them.

 

[hutcheson]

>I can see no reason for keeping DMOZ forum topics live ad vitam aeternam...

What does it matter whether you or I see a reason for that information to be available, if we can be humble enough to confess that we aren't omniscient?

Our attitude is: the whole point of the ODP is generating information and giving it away freely. We'd need a big reason to change direction.

But this is not at all to attempt to control what YOU do with YOUR website. You are under no obligation to post what I think is valuable, or to take it down when I tell you, or to justify leaving it up or taking it down whenever I ask.

So if you don't want to archive or link to that material from your own website, then don't. Nobody's feelings will be hurt, nobody will criticize you for it.

 

[hutcheson]

Aside from the self-imputed omniscience implied by the question ... assuming we went along with this suggestion, what would be next? Are you going to give us a list of books to steal from our local libraries and burn -- because you don't see any use in them?

Maybe the best reason for leaving the forum information up is that the best argument for taking them down is so downright straightforward EVIL. Because the idea of destroying information just because you can't see any immediate use for it -- if that's not pure evil, it comes pretty close.

 

[jimnoble]

though forums are public, they are nothing like as public as a Google search, and there are things that people would not say (confidential things) on a DMOZ forum it they thought at the time that they were saying them out loud on Google.

This is the internet - a very public place. I'm afraid that some people learn the hard way not to say things there that they wish to keep quiet.

A related problem is that people say things to each other in fora that they wouldn't dream of saying if they were standing next to each other in the pub.

My best advice is to think before posting.

 

[bobrat]

Yes indeed, nothing worse then posting on a forum how your competitor is ranking for a search term better than you, and how you are planning to get around his sneaky underhanded techniques and then finding that post is no ranking for the search term as #1 better than his site and better than mine.

Oh how I regret making that post - but it's there forever.

 

[Jacob Mathai]

This is the internet - a very public place.

My best advice is to think before posting.

Wise words. That is good advice both in life and on the internet.

 

[maxboll]

DMOZ policy. Ya shoulda known better, cobbler.

From the replies to this thread (as to some others), you really do get the impression that DMOZ policy is "We do it like this, we always have done, we always will do. Our answer to questions and ideas is not to consider whether they are good or bad, just to stonewall."
Telling people they should have thought first before doing such and such a thing is pretty pompous and self-righteous.
Yeah, the Internet's a pretty public place. This really is a stonewalling reply to the point I raised. It's also rather patronising - unless DMOZ editors do not understand that individual sites and pages are only as public as their owners or webmasters let them be, other than to the occasional hacker. But this debate is not about hackers.
No DMOZ editor has yet answered the suggestion I made that old, out of date and irrelevant threads should be deleted, or at least removed to a zone where they are not picked up by googlebots.
If the aim of DMOZ is to improve the quality of websearching, then removing out-of-date and generally irrelevant pages from search results, be they DMOZ results, Google results or anything else, is surely a step in the right direction. Or is some DMOZ editor going to produce a piece of tongue-in-cheek sophistry to prove that helping Google to include irrelevant and outdated results in its answers is all in the cause of the furtherance of knowledge and the dissemination of information ?

 

[lmocr]

Maybe you should ask Google why the results are showing up the way they are?

Maybe your website doesn't have enough links showing up - so they throw in what they consider to be revelant results? Maybe you need more SEO (did I really say that ). Maybe the information isn't considered old and outdated and irrevelent by Google? I'm guessing here.

Why should this, or any other, forum change the way information is stored just because someone else doesn't like it?

 

[hutcheson]

maxboll, you walk into someone else's website and tell them that whatever content YOU don't find useful has to be taken down, or else you'll call them names?

Do you really make a practice of this? Do you really go to your local library and tell them to pull all books more than two years old off the shelves because YOU don't find them useful? Do you go to other websites and pontificate about what content they are allowed to post? Have you denounced Project Gutenberg about their proclivity for posting 100-year-old magazines and 500-year-old science books?

And -- what would YOU do if someone who had never contributed anything to YOUR website came up and announced that you must justify your website's content to him, or they would call YOU names?

Answer that question, honestly, before posting any more in this forum.

This is a warning, and it is the last warning.

 

[motsa]

No DMOZ editor has yet answered the suggestion I made that old, out of date and irrelevant threads should be deleted, or at least removed to a zone where they are not picked up by googlebots.

Then let me answer you now.

If we decide at some point to prune old threads, we will. The fact that you don't like the way Google spiders this site will be completely irrelevant to that decision. So, thank you for your suggestion. We'll take it under advisement.

If you have issues with how Google spiders forums (and I presume you're not just talking about ours, but other forums as well since they're all spidered the same way), then you need to take that up with Google.

 

[bobrat]

The point of my post above was that this is normal policy with many forums. My experience has been that forum owners do not accept requests for posts to be removed, and that any busy successfull forum will have all it's posts indexed by Google, and those posts will get a high PR.

So there is nothing elitist about the way this forum is run.

There are emails I sent many years ago to group mailing lists that are still publicly available. Internet users will have to start getting wise the this - it's just the way things work.

 

[maxboll]

Well thanks Motsa anyway . You seem to have understood the issue.
But I'm afraid that Hutcheson's comments are completely beside the point.
a) No one's asking DMOZ to ask Google to do anything, and no'one's suggesting that this is a Google issue. It's not, it's a DMOZ issue. Trying to involve Google in the issue is just a red herring. I have no gripe whatsoever with the way Google spiders forums
b) Dmoz forums and public libraries are two totally different things - at least in the mind of anyone who does not have a very inflated view of the importance of chat in the DMoz forums. It is completely spurious to compare the two, and I'm surprised that someone with the status of Dmoz moderator cannot see the difference.
As for bringing notions of good and EVIL (your caps) into this, hey what on earth do some people think that DMOZ is ? A Billy Graham crusade or something? If DMOZ moderators are seeing their work in terms of good and evil, then I think that a lot of people are going to start asking questions .
Still, if it's now DMOZ policy to fight the good fight and combat EVIL, I'll go along with that up to a point. Perhaps you could start by removing the pornography links pages from the DMOZ directory, many of which are fundemantally evil, being linked to prostitution, people trafficking, exploitation and degradation. Or is this the kind of Evil that DMOZ can work with and promote quite happily ?

 

[bobrat]

Perhaps you could start by removing the pornography links pages from the DMOZ directory, many of which are fundemantally evil, being linked to prostitution, people trafficking, exploitation and degradation. Or is this the kind of Evil that DMOZ can work with and promote quite happily ?

I think many editors would agree. My guess is that the counter argument is that once we start censoring, where do we stop? I spend a lot of time defending DMOZ, but it's hard to deal with the kind of sites we list there.

 

[lmocr]

It's not a DMOZ issue - because this forum is not sponsored by Netscape or DMOZ or the ODP.

It's a Resource-Zone issue. On second thought, actually it's not - it's your issue. No one actually affiliated with Resource Zone seems to have an issue with the situation - at least not at this point.

Added after reading bobrat's post - the issue I'm talking about has nothing to do with ODP listing porn sites - it's the issue of Google returning forum threads as search results.

 

[hutcheson]

I could also point out that at least one visitor this week came looking for that information which is of no value to you, and was a bit miffed when he could not find it.

It is perhaps to the point that his purpose is one of those reasons that I mentioned in an earlier post.

So long as real users are finding a use for the content, anyone's bald assertion that there's one person on earth who is unable to figure out a use, is irrelevant. We suspected that already. And it didn't matter.

 

[Callimachus]

I rememebr when people used to complain that Deja-Vue archived every single usenet thread. It was posiible then (though occasionally difficult if you had changed e-mail address) to have your posts removed from their archive.

Then Deja-Vue was absorbed by Google and now it is virtually impossible to get an archived Usenet post removed from their archives. While they provide a mechanism to remove posts from their own Google Groups, they don't from the Usenet archives. And guess what one of the largest spam harvesting crops is?

Unwanted archived data is one of the pitfalls of the internet and very few archiving interests such as Google make provision for or have any desire to unarchive things.

As a reality for internet users, it means that one becomes accountable for what one says in public as it can come back to bite you in a variety of ways if you aren't careful.

That said - and as regards forums - very few forums remove older posts unless they are running short on storage space. Even then, they are usually archived out of public view or offline rather than simply erased.

Specifically as regards these forums, they are not officially part of the ODP but are run by a number of editors as a public venue for discussions on topics touching on the project. As a public forum Google sometimes visits as it does other sites. I am sure there are those who would be equally upset if Google were denied access and would start screaming about "hidden discussions".

As with many things that involve large numbers of people from a variety of environments - you can't please everyone. The corollary of course is that you cannot fail to upset someone. It's the "Catch-22" situation that is commonly called "damned if you do and damned if you don't".

 

[Steve Johnson]

According to Google, Google lists site's in order of 'importance' relating to any search-able keyword or keyphrase. It uses a number of algorithms to do this and nobody really knows how many or what they are.

If you're looking for 'sausages' for example and a R-Z page has come up and you're annoyed because of this then I'd say that there possibly isn't much else more important to show about the term sausages maybe?

I'm sure if there became more useful information available online about your term then the R-Z page would disappear unless it's a term like "A Public Forum Sponsored and Moderated by ODP Editors".

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?