Registration in LP should not automatically create an Ubuntu WikiName

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The main problem with creating a wikiname is that it shows on a user's launchpad page shows a link to an Ubuntu wiki homepage even where that user doesn't have such a homepage.

Could I suggest that as a workaround that link is hidden for users who haven't created such a page on the Ubuntu wiki?

Setting to High importance, because James Troup reports that this is now causing performance problems for the Ubuntu wiki. The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live) are crawling Launchpad, following the millions of links to non-existent Ubuntu wiki pages, and getting 404 pages in response. Because these aren't real pages, they're not cached. And because they're MoinMoin 404 pages, the wiki performs a search for similarly-named pages, hence the performance problem.

See also bug 186660 and bug 1745.

Kiko, can this be considered for the current cleanup cycle? Seems like a
trivial fix.

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I'll change the code to stop creating Ubuntu WikiNames for new accounts, but that won't be of much help because we already have millions created, so I think we also need to do one of

1. delete the ones that don't exist on the wiki
2. stop displaying them on a person's page
3. tell web crawlers not to follow them [1]

[1] rel=nofollow doesn't seem to be interpreted that way by googlebot, unfortunately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow#Interpretation_by_the_individual_search_engines

Any suggestions?

For #1, if you generate a list of all the Ubuntu wiki URLs that Launchpad currently associates with people, the sysadmins can (James tells me) compare that against the list of Ubuntu wiki pages that actually exist, to produce a list of URLs that should be removed.

I'm personally a fan of #2, on the grounds that nobody benefits from Launchpad knowing anything special about wikis (or why not "Edit Weblog URLs" and "Edit Forum IDs" pages, as well?), so you have better things to do than having to fix wiki-specific problems like bug 67646. Removing wiki URLs completely would contribute to simplifying profile-editing, too. Reasonable migration would be to append genuine wiki URLs to a person's description aka "home page" field, which would require doing #1.

#3 would dissuade some search engines but not others. And importantly, it wouldn't solve the problem for humans. Novices would be confused by the 404, while experts might reluctantly come to the conclusion that any link from a Launchpad person page to an Ubuntu wiki page is probably broken and not worth following.

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <email address hidden> wrote:
> For #1, if you generate a list of all the Ubuntu wiki URLs that
> Launchpad currently associates with people, the sysadmins can (James
> tells me) compare that against the list of Ubuntu wiki pages that
> actually exist, to produce a list of URLs that should be removed.

The reverse might be easier (admins giving us the list of wiki pages
rather than us giving a list of wikinames). Up to the admins though -
doesn't make any difference in workload at our end.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/

landed on mainline r6864

Awesome, thanks Salgado!