Don't allow arbitrary prefixes to our paths
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- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
- 33
- Forks
- 30
- Avg merge
- 2d 21h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 6
Description
I updated the robots.txt in #334. Unfortunately, we still see a sizable number of crawlers stuck because of two issues (see also #335). One issue is that urls may contain arbitrary prefixes in their path, e.g. http://openml.org/not-really-something-we-want/d/151 will gladly redirect to the dataset page, instead of just going to a 404-page. As I understand it, this means that the crawlers will happily crawl these pages (in any case, crawlers do visit pages with prefixes that don't do anything). I am hoping/assuming that disallowing these arbitrary prefixes will significantly reduce traffic as there are fewer urls to explore.
I am also not sure why crawlers try to crawl these pages though, that's probably a separate issue to figure out.
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by tracing the site's URL routing and reproduce the reported path, such as /not-really-something-we-want/d/151, alongside the direct dataset path. Done means arbitrary prefixes no longer redirect to the dataset page and instead return a 404 response.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- typescript
- Domain
- frontend, web-dev
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100