Topic Status Between Unlisted and Listed

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

A large Discourse forum is experiencing issues with toxic and inflammatory posts from users finding complaint topics through Google searches. elmstedt proposes adding a feature to toggle the noindex tag on specific topics without unlisting them, allowing search engines to exclude the topics from indexing. sam suggests implementing this feature through tags, with a site setting for excluded_from_web_indexing_tags and a tag group to keep the tag visible only to relevant groups, clearly indicating non-indexed topics to moderators.

1

I’m part of the moderation team on a large Discourse forum for a consumer product. We have an issue where complaint topics pop up on the Google front page and we get a significant number of hit-and-run posts from users finding the topic via Google, making an account, posting something toxic or inflammatory, and never returning.

It’s fine enough to handle through moderation, but it would be a great feature if we could toggle the noindex tag on the topic without resorting to unlisting the topic altogether.

4 Likes
3

I am a bit concerned about making a “unicorn” setting here cause of all of the chrome everywhere needed to surface it.

But I do like the idea a lot of using tags for this…

  1. Add a site setting (or maybe longer term “tag setting”) for excluded_from_web_indexing_tags

  2. Then if you want to keep this totally hidden, create a tag group and only make this tag visible to relevant groups.

This it will always be clear to the powers that be that you are looking at a topic that will not be indexed by Google/Bing/Etc.

3 Likes