WikiIndex talk:Community talk: Difference between revisions

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(→‎Dead wiki URL taken over by cybersquatters: link to another page where we go into more detail.)
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[[WikiIndex talk:How do you categorize a wiki that is no longer]].
[[WikiIndex talk:How do you categorize a wiki that is no longer]].


== Dead wiki URL taken over by cybersquatters ==


I bumped into [[WorldWideWiki.net]] and found that the URL that the page points to has actually been hijacked by cybersquatters who have set up a 'fake search engine'.
In my other intersts I collect Dungeons & Dragons links (why I do that isn't really relevant to this problem) and I've noticed that there are a number of vultures out there, who wait for dead websites to expire and then snap up the URLs. I believe that they do this so that they can also hijack the page rank that search engines, like Google, give to the dead websites. I think that the same thing that has happened to dozens of dead D&D websites has happened to WorldWideWiki.net.
I've posted a message about this on the [[Talk:WorldWideWiki.net|appropriate talk page]], but I think that this is an issue that will effect multiple dead wikis.
At the moment you have the [[:Category:Inactive]] thing, but that keeps the link active and 'feeds the cybersquatters' a level of visitors. However, I wouldn't propose deleting the dead URL either, as someone might want to feed it into the Wayback Machine and search for archived content.
These cybersqatters are profiting by stealing page rank that doesn't really belong to them, so ensuring that any page rank they are getting from WikiIndex will help make it less economically viable for these people to hijack dead wikis.
(Actually going beyond this and reporting cybersquatters to various search engines might be even more effective, as it could get the dead wikis permanantly removed from search engine listings. However, that might might be something the managers of this wiki don't want to get involved in.)
Anyhoo, I put this up here, so that people can talk about what should be done. At the very least, I'd like to see the dead URLs retained but disabled. [[User:David Shepheard|David Shepheard]] 10:15, 12 April 2009 (EDT)
:I hadn't thought about the page rank issue. There's also a [[:Category:Dead]], but it seems not to be in use. Maybe what we should do is replace the wiki's URL with the Internet Archive URL. That way, the actual wiki can be seen instead of the cybersquatter. --[[User:MarvelZuvembie|MarvelZuvembie]] 17:15, 8 May 2009 (EDT)


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