Re: Dealing with web bots
On 11/17/2019 9:56 AM, AB wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 01:21:12AM -0800, Bradley D. Thornton wrote:
>>
>>
>
> That proxy defeat seems a bit mean-spirited and exclusionary. When I want to
> share Gopher content, most of my friends don't have a Gopher client so I send
> them a proxy link. I know I certainly wouldn't download one (especially some of
> the mobile apps) just to see one item I may or may not appreciate. If we want
> Gopher to continue to grow and not stagnate, we can't act like HTML and Port 80
> are the enemy: most people learn about Gopher from the Web.
>
I appreciate what you're saying AB, and I have been flamed here on
occasion for this particular opinion of mine going back a decade.
I actually have the opposite view: If we want Gopher to continue to grow
and not stagnate, then we need to provide the impetus to use browser
products that are capable of natively (or via plugins, etc.) accessing
and retrieving data from Gopher services that offer unique content not
also available in HTTP space.
There are plenty of gopherholes that can be accessed by web proxies
which only contain information about Gopher related usage with links to
download Gopher clients or install such plugins to enable native browsing.
I don't view HTTP as an enemy, just "Yet another protocol" that has its
own set of respective utilities (i.e., browsers) to access that space.
For example, BBSes have made a huge comeback over the last few years,
with the incorporation of SSH support, and I have observed talks from
some SysOps to accommodate content in that space with a method to
accommodate the access of content on those servers with a web front end
(and indeed there do exist some facilities for that). The majority of
BBS SysOps discount the worth of that and to be sure, recognize the
irrelevance of having BBSes at all if the content available through
logging into a BBS is merely duplicated in HTTP space.
Most BBSes also support an ftpd option for serving up files, yet the
majority of SysOps I know do not provide access to their file bases this
way, for the reasons I site here.
I believe there's really no point in having gopher services if you're
just going to serve it up as HTML content anyway, and I'm rather
intransigent on that point. No offense intended :)
Not that anyone is interested in Slackware 10 pre-compiled packages
anymore, and I don't actually have them available anymore due to the
lack of relevance for such an old version, but my package repo for that
version of slackware was available exclusively via Gopher when it was
online, and indeed saw a lot of usage - much of that usage likely by
people that found that if they wanted it, were required to use native
Gopher protocol to browse and download those packages - not available
via FTP or HTTP, just Gopher.
I do believe, and hope that sooner than later, many devs will put Gopher
support capabilities back into browsers, the way the Dooble browser has
support for it, The way Firefox and Internet Exploder used to, and the
way that most browsers natively support FTP.
I hope that helps :)
--
Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
http://NorthTech.US
TEL: +1.310.421.8268
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