Yesterday, Smackdown noted that Wired put a robots.txt in place in response to spammers trying to use their wiki for spamalicious links. Oddly enough, that robots.txt also blocked everyone and everything, including Google and all the rest of the search engines, from the site. (Caveat: When I say “blocked everyone”, I’m referring to everyone who bothers to adhere to robots.txt).
Now, Wired has removed the robots.txt completely.
As noted here, people tend to think of Wired as having the techno-smarts to be able to get a simple thing like a robots.txt file right. I mean, it’s Wired, ya know? Wired! They are the go-to geeks, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Oh, gawd, please don’t shatter my illusions of sexy geeks capable of coding into the wee hours of the morning with pizza and Mt. Dew piled high. Please, oh please, tell me that Wired really does understand the basic concepts of robots.txt file. I’m not sure I could go on otherwise. My dreams would be destroyed.
That’s it. My day is ruined. I’m going back to bed. /sigh…
