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Tips for Use of Forum Software

PostPosted: Sat Sep 19, 2015 12:20 pm
by tahanson43206
The software chosen by Dr. Dartnell to support discuss.the-knowledge.org has features that are not immediately apparent to members.

This topic is offered as a thread for any member to report features that might be of general interest.

(th)

Re: Tips for Use of Forum Software: Cookies

PostPosted: Sat Sep 19, 2015 12:26 pm
by tahanson43206
The forum software chosen for discuss.the-knowledge.org has a useful capability that members might appreciate:

It can make cookies of login lines for Google Chrome or Ubuntu Firefox, and perhaps other programs as well.

To set a desired login name for a browser, use that name to attempt to log into discuss.the-knowledge.org.

Use a random set of characters for the password, since the intent is NOT to log in.

The forum software will record a cookie with the desired name, and the next time the member attempts to log into a web site with the browser, the desired name will appear.

Over time, this nice little feature can save a lot of time.

Note: this procedure must be used on each computer the member will be using, since the cookies reside on the individual system.

(th)

Re: Tips for Use of Forum Software: robots.txt

PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2015 5:13 pm
by tahanson43206
It has been discovered that the robots.txt file is misbehaving on the discuss.the-knowledge.org web site.

While investigating, I found that Google provides tools to report problems reported by their web crawler software:

Begin Quotation:
Crawl errors
Site crawl errors report

NEXT: ANDROID APPLICATIONS URL ERRORS
The Crawl Errors report for websites provides details about the site URLs that Google could not successfully crawl or that returned an HTTP error code.

OPEN THE CRAWL ERRORS REPORT

End Quotation.

The tool appears to be designed to work for the owner of a web site.

The symptom of the failure is that when one calls for: discuss.the-knowledge.org/robots.txt

The result is a re-direction to another web site. What should happen is that a text file should appear.

(th)