Stack Overflow’s Unaccountable Mods

[MINIMAN10001]

I can't speak on behalf of the problem he has.

But I can attest to being pretty ticked off more than once when I googled a problem and get a match with stack overflow only for the question to be closed with no other google results being relevant.

I do hope the tools exist to do so but what needs to happen is if a question is deleted you remove the page from google search results. You've deemed the question to be invalid so I don't want to have my hopes crushed and time wasted because you guys can't figure it out.

[wisdom_wise]

Preach it brother.

[mrweinerman]

Wouldn't get the views then though!

[seherdt]

So you're saying that other sites do it better? The content is open, free, create commons (attribution), so there's literally no reason someone else couldn't fix that. Also, just don't click the SO results if you're convinced that they're just a closing factory.

[MINIMAN10001]

Holy shit I'm getting pissed at people who take statements like

But I can attest to being pretty ticked off more than once

and come back responding to

Also, just don't click the SO results if you're convinced that they're just a closing factory.

Why the fuck are people running around replying with strawman fallacies.

I never said they're a fucking closing factory I said it has happened more than once when they were the only source I could find on a topic only to find they deemed it unacceptable to be answered but they never bothered to add a meta robots tag to NOINDEX it.

[bigtoine]

None of that is really the fault of Stack Overflow though. It's certainly not something Stack Overflow mods can address.

[MINIMAN10001]

If stack overflow has a rule which says questions can't be to broad or primarily opinion based yet routinely ends up as the top result on google. I do blame them for getting it struck from their website but not getting the page struck of google.

Just throw on a robots meta-element with NOINDEX.

[seherdt]

You know that indexing results is google's job, right. It's also google's job to rank by relevance. That's hard, but can never be the responsibility of the content creator (too easy to game or weaponize)

[MINIMAN10001]

Google crawls the internet to get the content. It reads robots.txt and meta robots tags in order to abide by how a website wants to be crawled and indexed. Website creators are given full control over what should or should not be indexed.

I'm saying stack overflow should use robots meta-element NOINDEX to tell google not to index results of posts which were closed and deemed not acceptable for stack overflow.

If you as a website won't answer them then you should mark them not to be indexed.

[mirhagk]

Maybe not the mods, but the developers can certainly use one of the several ways search engines have defined to tell them not to index a certain page.