Comments | suggestions: Treat deleted entries consistently to allow deletion of abusive comments

quinterius in suggestions

Treat deleted entries consistently to allow deletion of abusive comments

Jan 22, 2009 20:19

Title
Treat deleted entries consistently to allow deletion of abusive comments

Short, concise description of the idea
If an entry does not exist, then the LiveJournal server should ALWAYS give an Error 404. Else, abusive comments are cached permanently in Google.

Full description of the ideaCurrently, if the LiveJournal server is requested to display ( Read more... )

entry deletion, searches, § no status

Comments 19

charliemc January 27 2009, 20:18:50 UTC

+1

This should absolutely be the case, without question.

(Excellent suggestion.)

ex_uniquewo January 27 2009, 20:26:13 UTC

I'm not sure about the technical aspect of this but +1 to the idea of less caching of deleted stuff.

cos January 27 2009, 20:42:36 UTC

There is a drawback to this suggestion: Links to deleted entries still exist in LJ, so people navigating LJ will land on such pages. Currently LJ makes navigation available on such pages, and it's clear you're still on LJ. People might be confused by "broken" links inside LJ that used to be valid, and not realize that they've followed a link to an entry that used to exist but no longer does.

It's not a big drawback, and I'm not saying I oppose the suggestion. However it is worth noting.

polyfrog January 27 2009, 20:59:13 UTC

This drawback could be handled by putting some navigation on the 404 page, no? There is some there already....

In fact it is possible (though a bigger pain, coding-wise) to make the LJ server serve more or less the same "no such entry" page it does now as a 404 page.

cos January 27 2009, 21:06:01 UTC

I like that idea.

mlady_rebecca January 29 2009, 05:11:10 UTC

This variation seems more appropriate.

worldserpent January 27 2009, 20:49:10 UTC

Good idea.

danceinacircle January 27 2009, 20:54:03 UTC

I'm mongoose on the suggestion (though consistent behavior is always a plus), but I fail to see how it's LiveJournal's fault that Google won't remove a cached page without a 404. If the content is abusive and/or criminal, Google shouldn't be hosting it on their servers.

polyfrog January 27 2009, 21:02:46 UTC

But how do they programmatically determine that?

I get an abusive comment.
Google caches that page.
I delete the comment.
It's still in the cache; it gets served on the google search results page under "cached".

vs

I get an abusive comment.
Google caches that page.
I delete the comment.
Google sees the 404 next time the spider comes through and deletes the cache and references to it from results.

danceinacircle January 27 2009, 21:05:06 UTC

I know very, very little about Google's caching system - they don't have a way to manually remove items from the cache?

Also, wouldn't deleting the comment just remove that specific page (ie http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/917740.html?thread=14525420) from the cache? Would it still be cached under the http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/917740.html address? (Trying to understand!)

polyfrog January 27 2009, 21:21:26 UTC

They might have such a way. But they won't use it, because it would be a huge logistical nightmare to keep up with all the requests for its use.

We're venturing further away from what I know for sure about Google, but here we go:
Yes, they would still show a cache of the main comment page with the deleted comment for a while, until the cache was refreshed.

But the cache of the single comment would persist for quite a while longer (because it was changing less fast before being deleted), and be its own hit on the results page...unless the page is reported as a 404 the next time the spider comes through.

Thread 9