[Pkg-trac-devel] Bug#482181: please help reduce search engine pollution

[Sam Hocevar]

Package: trac
Version: 0.10.4-2
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

   This is a copy of a bug report I made upstream:

> By default Trac appends "- Trac" to each title page (top of header.cs).
> While this improves Trac's overall visibility, it also causes massive
> search engine pollution. With a trac, trac here and a trac, trac there,
> here a trac, there a trac, everywhere a trac, trac.
>
> Looking for proper information about Trac is now impossible. Any request
> is highly polluted by unrelated Trac installations.
>
> For instance, I was looking for a possible script to paste the Timeline
> information on an IRC channel. Quite naturally, my first try was "trac
> IRC bot" on Google. Alas! What I get are hits for Trac installations of
> the rbot, EnvBot or IRC Bot Workbench projects, which have absolutely
> nothing to do with Trac.
>
> Another example was just before submitting this bug report. I was
> wondering whether anyone else was annoyed by the pollution, so quite
> naturally I looked for "trac page title" on Google to see whether the
> problem with page titles was mentioned somewhere. And as you can see,
> there are hundreds of results, none of which have anything to do with
> Trac.
>
> And yes, I know how to play with inurl:, intitle: and site: keywords
> when doing Google searches. They just don't work well enough against
> that kind of search engine pollution.

   The ticket, at http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/7162, is marked as a
duplicate of http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/6628 and was also discussed
in http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3730 but was eventually closed as
WONTFIX with no justification and with laughable workarounds such as a
javascript snippet.

   I believe that if upstream is reluctant to fix this problem, Debian
at least could help by not shipping a polluting file by default. Trivial
patch attached.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24.3 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages trac depends on:
ii  python                      2.5.2-1      An interactive high-level object-o
pn  python-clearsilver          <none>       (no description available)
pn  python-pysqlite2 | python-s <none>       (no description available)
pn  python-subversion           <none>       (no description available)
ii  python-support              0.8.1        automated rebuilding support for P
ii  subversion                  1.4.6dfsg1-4 Advanced version control system

Versions of packages trac recommends:
ii  apache2                       2.2.8-4    Next generation, scalable, extenda
ii  apache2-mpm-prefork [httpd]   2.2.8-4    Traditional model for Apache HTTPD
pn  python-setuptools             <none>     (no description available)
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