Take a second look at the private entries list

[joby_toss]

Guys, from time to time, please remember to take a look at the list containing private entries, apps that don't have the required 10 voting points yet, there are some good, honest, deserving apps there!
And if you have questions or you don't agree with something in an entry's description you can post a comment on that entry and someone with editing rights will take a look at it at some point.
Thank you!

As of the time of this writing, the private apps list has 650 entries.

https://www.portablefreeware.com/index. ... B%23%5D&m=

P.S. Andrew, what do you think about making this link directly accessible from the front page, as a button?

[Midas]

Great idea, thanks for the reminder.

I quickly browsed recent entries and upvoted two of them I've been using for over a year (Betterbird, Sizer)...

[Andrew Lee]

As of the time of this writing, the private apps list has 650 entries.

https://www.portablefreeware.com/index. ... B%23%5D&m=

P.S. Andrew, what do you think about making this link directly accessible from the front page, as a button?

That is easy to do, but I think the original intention was to keep the private entries off the search engine indexing, otherwise it might lead to spamming.

If you guys think this is no longer a concern, let's discuss and I can definitely add a link to the private entries quite easily.

[joby_toss]

So, if it's a button on the front page, google indexes the private entries? No, I don't like it then.

[vevy]

Maybe only show the button to logged in users

[dmocha]

Maybe only show the button to logged in users

I support it

[lwc]

So, if it's a button on the front page, google indexes the private entries? No, I don't like it then.

Then when it's a private entry use the HTML header <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> or HTTP response header X-Robots-Tag: noindex.
It's not perfect since search engines might ignore it, but hopefully the leading ones won't.

This should spare you the need to link to those pages using <a href=... rel="nofollow">.

I've also wanted to suggest put private entries in robots.txt, but Google states "robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers are discovered when a URL is crawled. If a page is disallowed from crawling through the robots.txt file, then any information about indexing or serving rules will not be found and will therefore be ignored. If indexing or serving rules must be followed, the URLs containing those rules cannot be disallowed from crawling."

If you want to be really tough, you can detect bots and block them from seeing those entries (the most straightforward way is probably via .htaccess).

[Andrew Lee]

Thanks for all the suggestions! It looks like it's definitely doable, so I will add it to my todo list.

As I mentioned previously, I am still on extended family vacation, so please be patient and I will get to it as soon as I can

[lintalist]

I had a quick peek at the entries and did notice a few very old or even duplicate ones - how to deal with those? - should a chat client for a deprecated platform remain on there? Is there a way to flag these - apart from editing the title with a "tag" or something?

[Midas]

how to deal with those?

If memory serves, someone was keen on re-using failed/duplicated entries a long time ago -- no harm done from what I recall...

[Andrew Lee]

Yes, that was the original conclusion

1) these are no viewable by the public, so they can be messy
2) they can be recycled later if necessary