h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The thread titled Interracial Breeding on Ask h2g2 sums up everything that makes me most proud about the h2g2 community.

F19585?thread=269688

Whilst the initial post is obviously a troll, the reaction sums up the differences between h2g2 and many other online communities. First, there was (deliberate) bemused (and amusing) misunderstanding, just to check that the poster was indeed asking what we all thought they were asking; then Hoovooloo's concise demolition job.

And Bob the Farmer went from being insulted, through 'sitting with damaged genes' to boasting of his hybrid vigour.

Many other online communities would have descended into an inferno of flaming and troll baiting. We started talking about Mr Blobby.

It just goes to show that, while certain opinions are repellent to the vast majority of people, it's better to confront them than try to stifle them. h2g2's unique combination of facts and ridicule does the job perfectly.

Who knows - maybe someone reading it might even have their opinion changed?

It makes me enormously proud to have had something to do with creating such a community.

may be we need this F68049?thread=115487&post=981941

that's a good thread.

It's the best feel-good thread that I've seen in ages.

we've always known that H2G2 is a blessed star in Internet Forums.

-- DoctorMO --

"We started talking about Mr Blobby"..

It takes a lot of effort to get that far off topic in such a short time

It's not anymore, but I see your point. behaps we should have who ever caused it to be put in H2G2 Stocks

-- DoctorMO --

I think even 'DNA' himself would be proud, maybe that one thread encapsulates everything 'he' hoped h2g2 would be.

Sorry to butt in on all you ACES, GURUS and even More Exalted Ones

The thread you're talking about makes very good reading and makes me proud to say I subscribe here. My reaction to trolls is usually just "ignore" but this thread has done a brilliant job of both uniting people and explaining to s that their views are wrong, repellent and unacceptable.

I would have posted on that thread, but I think the work has been done

I'd just like to say - WELL DONE - to the staff who run this site for letting the discussion continue - thats what its's all about.

Hey, Jim, you know, your page turns up on page 1 of Google in a search for "interracial breedinG"?

Peachy keen

total agreement with you
but....... please dont call the troll a it gives us s a bad name



Jonathan

Really? Cool! Google is looking at us again.

Interesting. I take it that you left all the threads invisible to spiders, but allowed them to view articles and personal spaces?

RhoMuNuQ

Jonathan - I apologise to all the s out there - -

Enjoy Beltane !

ps if you're male, aren't you a Warlock, strictly speaking ?

*waves* Hi Jim hope you dont mind me changing the subject just for this posting

Peachy Keen

thanks for the apols and the Beltane wishes, as to your point male witches have always been witches to me for the last 25 years , most followers of wicca and paganism that I know male and female also think of themselves as witchs ........and on a lighter note .........PYT was talking 'Warlocks!'



Blessed be to all

Jonathan

Yeah - Google loves us just recently. It's quite funny really, the spider on some occasions not only provides four results on account of skin (more for Personal Spaces), but also duplicates them on account of different servers!

I think that's the mystery of why h2g2's been running so slowly solved! Searching Google for 'RhoMuNuQ' gave no results before I signed up, and when h2g2 was invisible to spiders. Now, it gives 64 pages of results.

RhoMuNuQ

I wonder if there's some way the spiders could be told to only look at one version of a given page - exclude access to all but vanilla (and thus currently Brunel) http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/(foo) rather than looking at it once in each skin. It would sure make the results less annoying to wade through.

Come to that, they'd ideally only look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/(foo), and let dna work out which site it was part of - at the moment it will find results for A-numbers with the wrong site in their URL. But that would mean some rather crazy reorganizing of link-generation code, I guess. Unless, of course, you made a completely different kind of meta-skin, just for spiders...

I think I'll shut up now, given the amount of manpower actually available...

It's very dangerous (apparently) to try and send something different to the Google spider than you would to a normal user, because Google allegedly requests things while pretending to be a normal browser, and compares what it gets to what it got as Google. If they think you're trying to fool it (like stuffing lots of keywords into your text) then you might get removed or dropped to the bottom of the list.

The skins system is a real problem for us because of this - once Google gets a link to a skin specific URL, all the subsequent URLs have the skin in, so we get this duplication.

Not an easy problem to solve.

Google doesn't seem very well-suited to large dynamic sites like this...