[GRASS-dev] robots.txt blocking grass 4/5 docs

Hi,

I notice that now grass 4/5 docs are blocked from search engines by
robots.txt.

Is it really a good idea? there is some interesting info which is useful
to mine from time to time. e.g. the old v.in.gshhs man page which is not
present in grass 6.

AFAIR some of the old man pages were never fully "ported" to grass 6 and
good info is only in the grass 5 pages. Often the new grass 6 version is
very terse. I think there is some old RT bug/wish about that.

so what's the bad behaviour that makes this necessary?

curious,
Hamish

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Hamish <hamish_b@yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi,

I notice that now grass 4/5 docs are blocked from search engines by
robots.txt.

Is it really a good idea? there is some interesting info which is useful
to mine from time to time. e.g. the old v.in.gshhs man page which is not
present in grass 6.

Ok, we can discuss this but...

AFAIR some of the old man pages were never fully "ported" to grass 6 and
good info is only in the grass 5 pages. Often the new grass 6 version is
very terse. I think there is some old RT bug/wish about that.

The problem is that page ranking brings up the old stuff on top
of common GRASS manual searches. This leads to people
believing that it is latest and greatest.

so what's the bad behaviour that makes this necessary?

Try to search recent GRASS manual pages - almost impossible.
Also, grass.osgeo.org seems to have a pretty low page ranking
while disfunctional mirrors pop up on top.

Suggestions welcome (an feel free to revert the robots.txt change).

Markus