This is site is rated G, for all audiences.
February 13th, 2004 by admin
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p>So, it would seem that this site is doing rather well on certain, shall we say, adult-oriented google searches. Specifically, the writeback page for the Panther tip on changing one’s shell is getting a fair amount of hits from google searches that don’t have anything to do with bash or tcsh. This is a rather unfortunate confluence of automatic bots and web crawlers. Let me explain.
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p>The “comments” feature you see at the bottom of every story utilizes a simple POST mechanism for getting your comments on the web. Anyone can comment, and there’s no real check on what you say – except for the fact I monitor my weblogs for posts and then read the comments and perhaps reply.
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p>Every now and then some bot, I guess it’s a bot, will post a comment that is merely a bunch of pornographic words and maybe links. Like 200 of them all in one comment. So, I see this and I delete it of course. It happens once maybe every few weeks or a month.
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p>However the last time it happened, google and the other webcrawlers which index the web found the page with these “comments” before I could delete it. So suddenly my web site is turning up in google searches for “nude pics” among other, more explicit, things.
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p>I find this all kind of funny; I’m certain that those who are coming to this site looking for pictures for anything other than the Crab nebula or some screen shots of MacOS X will be rather disappointed. I also think it shows the drawbacks of aggressive web search engines…. and also these unrestricted comment features on Blosoxm powered web logs. I’m not the only G-rated Blosoxm site that turns up on adult-themed google searches. Karelia Software, maker of popular OS X program Watson, has a similar problem. 
