Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] robots.txt disallows all spiders for mailing lists

[Noah Slater]

On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 11:28:41PM +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> Noah Slater wrote:
> > Sylvain, Karl, thoughts?
>
> Sylvain and Karl are not GNU sysadmins, so they have little to do
> here, except expressing an opinion.

I was under the impression that lists.gnu.org was under the domain of control of
the Savannah team. Is this not the case? Where would be the proper place to take
my concerns about this matter?

> > > the GNU project does not have a mission to make their life easier
> >
> > You have the wrong framing, this is about making it easy for users.
>
> In the long term, I don't think that making an archive Google-friendly
> is a good goal.  But that's just me, I was expressing personal
> opinion.

Again, you have the wrong framing.

This isn't about making the archives Google friendly, it's about making them
people friendly! At the moment, allowing them to be indexed by Google is the
lowest hanging fruit that helps us move closer to that goal.

When I have a problem with some software, I want to see if other people have had
the same kind of problem. Mailing list archives contain the shared knowledge and
solutions of a whole community and forms one of the most important resources
available to any free software project.

> I expect that users of GNU software read the supplementary documentation

We cannot help users with wishful thinking.

What you expect and what happens in reality are very different.

> which saves the trouble to resort to a mailing list in 99% of the cases,
> except when a genuine bug is discovered, or a bizzare but valid use case is
> being brought in.

Mailing lists are useful for much more than bug reporting.

They act as a central place for the community to gather and discuss the software
and share knowledge. This forms a crucial resource that remains largely untapped
unless it is available to search engines.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater