[mythtv-users] Google ate my recordings

[Michael T. Dean]

On 10/24/06 14:22, Carl Fongheiser wrote:

>  On 10/24/06, Glenn Chubak <glenn at saskatoon.com> wrote:
>
> > I would have thought that mythweb "Are you sure?" dialogs would
> > have stopped the googlebot but it doesn't seem so. If anyone is
> > interested I can post the access logs from apache.
>
>  Those dialogs only happen if the browser is Javascript enabled.
>  Needless to say, the robots don't execute the Javascript code. For
>  the future, you'll probably want to password-protect MythWeb. It's
>  also a good idea to put a robots.txt file at the top level of your
>  web server's document tree. For details, look here:
>  http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
>
>  Finally, I strongly recommend not having your MythWeb installation
>  exposed directly to the Internet. That invites all kinds of trouble.

IMHO, the robots.txt is completely useless since no robot should ever be 
allowed into the web app (as you mentioned in the second point).  Once 
Google gets info about your site--even with a robots.txt in place--that 
allows Google users to identify it as a MythWeb site, some sociopathic 
netizens will follow the Google-bot into your site and do Bad Things 
(i.e. delete the recordings, delete channels, delete settings, set up 
user jobs to do evil things to your Myth box--are you starting to get 
the idea that deleting recordings is probably the least bad thing that 
could happen?).  So, make sure you keep your Myth box out of the search 
engines (with appropriate authentication settings) or you're inviting 
real trouble.

Mike