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robots.txt should be split to common and localisable parts
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Description

Currently, if [[MediaWiki:Robots.txt]] exists, it is used as this wiki's robots.txt. However, this method blocks the way for developers to introduce centralised changes to robots.txt, such as blocking of new spiders. Therefore, I propose to build it from two parts: centralised one, containing user agent rules and prohibition from indexing /w/, and content of MediaWiki:Robots.txt, if present. Centralised part could be accessible to shell users, or be mirrored from Meta, like www portals currently do.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt

Details

Reference
bz15601

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 10:21 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz15601.

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

No, it would likely be located at the default location, not on-wiki. The whole point is that the common part will be set by sysadmins, not end-users. They can edit the per-wiki part at MediaWiki:Robots.txt already.

For reference, this is documented at [[wikitech:robots.txt]].