Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Exclude profile from search engine bots/spiders

I'm not sure if this is something everyone would want, but I'm sure some don't like that a quick google search of their character names etc can essentially track down a persons every interest and involvement.

It's not exactly a difficult feature to implement, given the extent of database driven page content for profiles as it stands. It'd simply be a boolean statement for whether to add the meta data associated with search bots or not to the page header, it'd have no impact on this websites own search features.

At worst, it'd take an hour or two to implement.

I personally wouldn't exclude my profiles from the search engines. If I don't want to be found I will use different aliases to prevent being tracked down, although I'm not sure why someone would want to to begin with.

I don't know how many people would use this feature. Right now I don't believe there are many who care about search engine results including their profiles or not.

This also brings up the question how anonymous profiles are handled. Is it a per character feature? Does it affect an account as a whole, including their anonymous characters? How would this look on the user's end? Do users even know what sort of consequences toggling such an option would have?

It sounds simple to implement but there are a ton of factors to include. We don't know for sure how Kim has everything setup and working behind the scenes so if this is feasible in 2 hours max, I don't know.

Its definitely an interesting suggestion though. Curious to see what others have to say about it!

As all of your characters are set to anonymous, they can't be linked to "all of your interests and involvements." I view this as basically a duplicate of what anonymous characters provide.

Anonymous characters only covers what characters are connected to a username, not their existance from the internet.

Though, I suppose this has been definitively shot down.

I'm sorry, this isn't a feature I'm very interested in devoting time to. The site's original purpose was to provide publicly accessible character profiles that people could share with one another. It feels counter to the goal to create a site but hide it from the internet.

Is the fear more about people gathering too much IC info OOC and using that unfairly?

Nah, because that would have to be other sites that would have to protect their pages from search bots.

I was just suggesting it, as a means of protecting the user, not the character. For instance, one of my character names I use for many other sites, games, Xbox Live, PSN etc, a mistake on my part I'm sure. But the friends who may know my XBL, may not be the same friends I'd introduce to other aspects of my life. If it's not something you think will improve things for everyone, then no worries, it's just my problem.

I can see it improving life for a small subset, but not enough to leap this to the top of the already teetering tower of new features and upgrades that need attention.

Unless you only play one sort of character, I don't know if an XBL handle would be enough to link a character with a similar name to you even if your XBL friends did look it up. The number of actually unique character names even on the site is pretty small, and smaller still when the entire interwebs get taken into account.

Heh, if you need any help with that let me know.

<-- Web developer.

We can consider this thread done then.