Life use to be grand, I could type in a quick keyword description of my problem or the area of interest I wanted and either altavista or google would pop open the relevant websites.
Then came experts exchange, they would annoy me by having high relevance in the results but force a registration if you wanted to see the rest of the information; still it was possible to deal with this by blocking their url on the search results.
Then came the man2html people, it started slowly only a few sites did it - but it was damn annoying having more than one site show me the man page I had already looked at on the system.
It grew, as people thought what a brilliant idea, perhaps spurred on by thinking they were helping out the community.
Until today when I am only met with a bunch of search results that are man pages. The web as a basis for technical research into the operating system components has been broken by man page spamming
If you want man pages up on your site for your reference (though god only knows why you think you will have a browser but no man system) then please add:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
Allowing forums, and mailists to be indexed as well seems to generate more noise than hits - so perhaps we need to introduce some method of marking threads that have some value, ie marked as solved allows it be indexed.
For those who were interested in what I was looking for it revolved around changing the location of the bash startup scripts for users, and removing the dot files in the home directory overall - now there is a site that deals with this problem, I have seen it a few years back (I should have bookmarked!!
), but nowadays I either get man pages or maillists where someone mentions the idea and another says they are not bothered.
