• Mood: blah

Some information about Fandom History's new tool

Firstly I have to say I have NOTHING to do with Fandom History at all. I am not involved at any level, it is not a site I visit and as such I know nothing in depth about this project - other than what I have gleaned from partly_bouncy. Thus, if you have concerns, want to rant, want to ask questions, want to praise, etc. etc. etc. please don't rant at me - I am merely sharing this information as it involves privacy settings. As they say 'don't shoot the messenger'.

I have recently learnt that Fandom History is launching a Live Journal Bot. It's purpose is to help Fan History create a better directory of members of fandom, improve articles about LiveJournal users and members of fandom. It creates articles about members of fandom on LiveJournal if the LiveJournal user has decided not to exclude bots from accessing their profiles and where an article with the same name has not already been created on Fan History.

The Bot will create a list of fandom people based on membership of over 1,000 Live Journal fandom communities. The Bot will honour your viewing options, i.e. if you have 'Minimize your journal's inclusion in search engine results. Selecting this option also means that your entries will not be publicized at external sites that have content partnership with LiveJournal' ticked, the Bot will not include you in Fandom History. However, that also means that whilst you might actually like having your journal show up in Google and other similar search engines, etc., in order for your journal not to be included on Fandom History, you do have to have this option ticked. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways.

TPTB on Fandom History do give an assurance that if someone has had an article created about them and they do not want it, by following the procedure under Help:Article Deletion the article will be removed.

So in short if you want to avoid any chance of your LJ being picked up by Fandom History's LJ Bot you should go to viewing options and make certain that 'Minimize your journal's inclusion in search engine results. Selecting this option also means that your entries will not be publicized at external sites that have content partnership with LiveJournal' is ticked.

I repeat, I have nothing to do with Fandom History at all. I am merely giving my f-list the head's up about this new venture, in case they wish to opt out. (FWIW, I personally do not like this Bot project and I have shared my concerns about it).

ETA - 30th October I know that quite a few people do not like the idea of having to go to FH to check to see if the Bot or anyone else has added a page about them, as it pushes up the hits for the site.

msilverstar has provided the following information as a way to check it out, without having to go there (literally copy and pasted from the comment)

(copy-paste, replace the word schmoop with your term of interest)

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Afanhistory.com+schmoop
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afanhistory.com+schmoop

She probably won't get any hits from that.

You can click the "cached copy" page, but it will probably up her hit count, because even the cached pages have weblogging links to google-analytics, statcounter, activemeter, ljtoys, and the ad services quantserve and projectwonderful. At least.

On the other hand, there are independent cached copies around. Various crawlers and such . . .

ETA 2 FYI I asked for the page that had been created (not by the Bot) on me to be removed - I had an email confirmation that this had happened less than six hours after the request and the page has indeed been removed.