They’re not necessarily capable of handling such occurrences of bad behavior if it’s coming from off-board, as I think I’ve demonstrated is the case here. The technical fix that has been suggested is allegedly very quick to implement. (“30 seconds” was suggested, although that is certainly an exaggeration of how quick it would be. It takes me longer than that just to sign in, usually.)
Besides that (defining a canonical URL), why is the domain given a wild-card in DNS servers all over the world? Is there something in the site’s registration that specifies that? Seems like that ought to be eliminated.
fartypants was simply kinda silly. cu… OTOH seems really degrading to the SDMB brand, and it’s all over the search engines now. I’m surprised you aren’t all over this. And we know now that it wasn’t the fault of any post made by any person on this board. It came from off-board.
It seems that a fairly serious oversight in the search engine optimization and DNS settings of the boards is the root problem and this ‘bad behavior’ is just one symptom that reveals it.
Besides allowing these shenanigans, having the SDMB indexed under multiple domains with the same content, replicated dozens (one day hundreds, one day thousands) of times over makes it look like a big, disorganized mess to anyone actually trying to use Google to, you know, find content on the boards, as opposed to making the next funny domain prefix for them. And to Google it makes it look like a possible scam to drive up search results.
It also inconveniences members, even well-behaved ones, who click a link from their search results and find they are no longer logged in at the new domain they wound up at.
It appears that it can even get long-standing members warned for doing such a search and then accidentally pasting what they find - exactly what the search engine has provided to them, which is exactly what the SDMB has provided to the search engine - into their post.
The way this administrative oversight is being revealed through such bad behavior is not something mods here have much control over. The ‘technical solution’ to this bad behavior is simply managing the site’s DNS settings and search engine preferences correctly.
Copy-pasting a Google link is not bad behaviour. Allowing your website to be accessed using words you don’t want to appear on it is, if not actual jerkitude, at minimum hypocrisy.
The issue here isn’t where the link originated, Senegoid, it’s how it was posted to the SDMB. If Pasta is saying it was an accident we can discuss that with him.
Exactly. It’s not up to us to make sure the Google links are correct. The admins should be taking a more proactive approach to attempt to fix the issue.
Yes, it was an accident, and it was even many hours before I picked apart what I had been warned for. (I finally thought to check ATMB, where I found this thread.)
Through my posts above and in my reply to the PM I received from admin, I think the history is clear. As mentioned, I know that the admin have limited time to fuss over such matters, but even a brief skim of my posting history should suggest that I am a victim and not a perpetrator of this prank. I was taken aback by the guilty-first-don’t-even-ask-questions-later approach.
Editing the offending link quickly was, of course, appropriate.
I do not need an apology, but I would request an in-GQ-thread revocation of the warning and a note that the offending URL was caused by a exploited vulnerability in how the name servers are configured and the boards indexed by Google and that the poster (i.e., me) was unaware of this issue.
This is certain to strike other posters. We are encouraged (explicitly or otherwise) to use Google search for the board to keep the load off the internal servers, and that is a dangerous practice at the moment.
Pasta, I did think you had manually typed it in … I didn’t think malicious intent but more like “inappropriate joke.” But one that has potentially serious consequences for others.
I do see that you are a victim in this too. And I apologize to you, I did not see the situation fully or correctly.
Your warning will be rescinded as soon as I’m finished typing this post.
And I will take this all back upstairs with more urgency.
Also if they check the subsections there under “Doorway pages” and “Sneaky redirects” they can see that leaving things as they are could ultimately get SDMB banned from the Google index completely.
The “bad behavior” in this instance appears to be a single link on another site, which is not actually something your mods and admins can control. The root problem isn’t “someone on the internet can link to cuntlapper.straightdope.com”, the problem is “this board happily serves up content under the URL cuntlapper.straightdope.com and does nothing to correct google’s assumption that that’s a proper URL for it.”
If the fact that your server responds to cuntlapper.straightdope.com is embarrassing to you, it’s in your power to fix it. This is way more effective than trying to police inbound links like an amateur webmaster in the 1990’s.
I checked with the person who administers the DNS record for straightdope.com and found that a wildcard alias had been put in place that was resolving all possible subdomains. The wildcard alias has been removed from the DNS record so once the update propagates fully the offensive subdomains (or any subdomain that is not one of the official ones which are boards., chicago., or www.) should no longer resolve.
I always thought that wildcard DNS entries were a bad idea unless you made very specific provision for it, such as configuring your web servers and other provided services to accommodate them.
Sad that it took only Cecil knows how many threads on this subject before it finally got fixed, and that people had to be exposed to the terrible word “cuntlapper,” but I’m glad it finally did get fixed.
As of now, 7 PM July 8, your post berating and warning Pasta in this thread remains unchanged. Anyone reading the thread will assume that your allegation against him was well-founded. Likewise, later on in the thread, there is still no apology or any indication to the casual reader that Pasta has been acquitted
