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Why Do Some Themes Have Local Tags Instead Of Global Tags?

  1. wank
    Member

    The bit where she said 'I just want the globals out of my post'?

    It's confusing the kids because when they click on the post category links, this sends them without warning out of the safe space of the blog into the unmoderated wilderness of global tags.

    We've suggested one possible solution (flagging the blog as mature) and would like to know whether it will work. Please confirm that if a blog is hidden from search engines and/or marked as 'mature', its post category links will lead to the category page for that blog. Any other behaviour is seriously broken. Blogs which are not part of the global tags system should not be forced to link to it. Nor should their post links be leading to a 'not found' message.

    (Another possible solution would be to label the post links as global; but it's been made clear on multiple occasions that you're not willing to do that so I'm not really sure why I bothered mentioning it. After all these months of kvetching I've come to accept that ad revenue is more important than accessibility.)

  2. timethief
    Member

    cross reference: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16567

  3. atthe404
    Member

    Of course strictly speaking there are no *kids* at WordPress dot com anyway. Cough.

  4. options
    Member

    hello there

    wank wrote:

    Sending 404s can't be intended behaviour. Nobody wants to make their site look more broken than it is. Did you get any response from support when you told them about the bug?

    you'll be laughing, but, yes, it can!

    here is my "Feedback" request (as Mark don't quote original requests I had to recall it):
    .
    ----------------------

    this is just one of a Mature blog posts:
    http://udoj.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/broken-chains/
    (navigation in other posts is broken the same way)

    this is where this post category link leads to ("Not Found" Global Tags page):
    http://wordpress.com/tag/blogs-in-our-monkeysphere/

    1. why Mature blogs which are not part of the Global Tags system are forced to link to it?
    2. why their post Category links are leading into a 'Not Found' page, which don’t even contain the post that sent you there?

    ----------------------
    .

    here is the response I've got:

    From: support @ wordpress.com  < Mark @ wordpress.com >
To: options@wordpress.com
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007
Subject: [WordPress #KNH-592276]: [categories] [options.wordpress.com]
         Why the Category links within a Mature blog posts
         lead into "Not Found" Global Tags page? 

Hi,
I've checked udoj.wordpress.com and it is working as I would expect.
-

Mark

    see: "it is working"!

    just not as you or your casual visitor (or anyone else but wp.com staff) would expect...

    now this is really a "hands down" situation.

    and it's not even about that 'ad revenue is more important than accessibility'. as I've already said somewhere:

    * GT pages don't have ads on them, Matt said:
    We don’t show ads on that traffic, and our business is such we don’t need to.

    * GT do increase distribution of other categorized/tagged .com blogs within a total number of page-views, however they don't increase net page-views number on .com.

    if it were about 'ad revenue' indeed, then I wouldn't even bother myself to mention it anywhere and shut myself down, because this farking GT system would be reasonable, at the very least.

    but it's NOT even about profit (or, at least, I can't see how), and that's exactly what making it so absobloodylutely mind-boggling.

  5. wank
    Member

    This is where Matt admits to showing ads on the global tags pages:

    We very occassionally [sic] show Adsense (contextual text ads) on post and tag pages.

    Presumably the 'traffic' Matt refers to is from wordpress.com blogs into the tags pages. OK, so he's not misleading our readers in order to get clickthroughs from them. However, forcing every wordpress.com user to link to the tags pages does substantially increase the chance of said tag pages turning up in Google searches. More people coming in from Google = more people seeing the ads. The baffled wordpress.com users are just collateral damage.

    Blogs marked private are allowed to opt out because their linkbacks won't count for anything in Google. Mature blogs are not, because the global tag links were never intended to be useful for anyone other than Automattic. So what if they're forced to link to pages that have nothing to do with them? It's another PR link for the pages in question, which is all that matters.

    So it is, still, absolutely about ad revenue, just not precisely in the way we were speculating. What this explanation leaves out is why they don't label the links. I'm inclined to revert to my original feeling that this is merely laziness.

  6. sunburntkamel
    Member

    FWIW, i don't know if this is something they've changed in the past few days, but they're NOT sending 404's, they're sending 200 OK's for empty tag pages, despite the fact that it is, in fact, an error page. that, of course, along with the always amusing

    X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.

  7. options
    Member

    re: 'to join the fun'

    not sure if sending responses as such one:

    it is working as I would expect

    would be too much of fun.

  8. matt
    Staff

    options, et al, please save the paranoid conspiracy theories for your own blogs. Don't pollute our forums. Closing this thread.

  9. timethief
    Member

    @Matt
    Prior to closing this thread, would you please take the time please to answer the OP's question for us?

    Why Do Some Themes Have Local Tags Instead Of Global Tags?

  10. matt
    Staff

    That question was answered a while ago, before the conspiracy theories started even.

    It has nothing at all to do with themes, it had to do with his friend having the "hide this blog from search engines" option enabled, which makes the tags go local, and has for over a year now.

    What's funny is the OP's friend actually wanted the links to be global and changed her options so they would be, so the subsequent pet issue ranting is that much more ridiculous. Add that to the fact that half or more of what options and wank said has a low correlation with reality, and it becomes obvious that you guys need to get out more.

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