Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Okay - HoL is now open range territory - read without log-in
I've been umming and aahing for a while now about opening up the site so that everything can be read without the need to login.
I've just been improving things on our Facebook page so that more content gets read over and goes where we want it! This has meant that now full stories can only be read on HoL, whereas before the whole thing copied over to Facebook. A HoL Facebook user politely suggested it was about time we stopped being coy and came out from behind our log-in wall.
That's prompted me to think again and even see bigger increases to the number of daily users.
Good thing? Bad thing?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I've edited the robots.txt file which as I understand it deals with all search engines. Happy to be corrected by a true techie.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Or you could all just take refuge behind gardening monikers such as Pete Moss or Moss Pete, M-P Compost, John Innes 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 . . . or off-shoots of local pubs past or present: Sally S Bury, L.Adder Gordon, Queen Shed, Mortimer Legs, OAE . . . etc.
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Permalink Reply by patrick byrne on
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Hi Hugh, I joined HOL only recently and have found it to be a fascinating site, even though I do not understand all of the functions and options available. Being able to "read only" without signing in certainly makes the current information immediately accessible and may encourage broader participation.
As other respondents have noted, members would need to be more wary of the material they are posting as it immediately becomes public, as do their names, unless they are using pseudonyms.
I do not have any problem with the change, but if there are concerns maybe an on-line poll should be conducted - true internet democracy!
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Permalink Reply by wholepint on
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Just a couple more general thoughts as well - although I think it's great to have the site content generally open and this will hopefully lead to more content being shared and a more active community, it may be worth discussing if some areas (policing and safety for example?) should remain closed to non-members? People may be less likely to want to ask questions or post info about certain topics (e.g. if someone has a dodgy landlord and wants advice on how to handle it) if they are aware that the dodgy landlord can easily find the discussion...
...but then again if membership has never been restricted, it perhaps doesn't make too much difference.
(I work in web and tend to ummm and ahhh over these kind of issues too, as you can see.)
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Worth umming and aahing over. We're all getting used to a new world, even those of us who live with tech as pat of our everyday lives.
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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on
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As a general point, I do think more discussion and notice on this would have been sensible.
People do behave differently depending on who they think will observe them - and this applies to online spaces as well. We have well-developed social instincts about what is/isn't appropriate in various physical contexts (no shagging in the park).
The rub with digital spaces is that the rules can change arbitrarily in the future, making things more widely visible than the originator would have expected.
This isn't a simple public/private distinction - I can do things in public which have a low possibility of being observed, or that have a high possibility. When things can be recorded and recalled at will, things change again.
I'm sure we've all at some point done something in a public place which if a CCTV recording of was now permanently attached to our identity we'd find very uncomfortable.
So simply deciding to change the rules one day violates basic expectations of users. This might have been the right decision, but it wasn't done the right way.
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There's a difference between somebody being able to find something with effort, and somebody finding things with zero effort.
The difference is not just quantitative, but qualitative. Typing someone's name into a search engine and finding pictures, birth dates, addresses etc is different to having to manually trawl through registry offices, phone books etc. The information was always public, but it wasn't accessible.
Making information accessible (it's Google's mission), changes the way the information is used and also how individual's privacy is affected.
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