Opened 4 months ago
Last modified 4 months ago
#7672 new defect (bug)
Alter sensitive data replacement mechanism
Reported by: | jonoaldersonwp | Owned by: | |
---|---|---|---|
Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
Component: | Support Forums | Keywords: | seo |
Cc: |
Description (last modified by )
When users submit forum threads with sensitive data (system filepaths, etc), I believe that we automatically detect and replace those strings with 'xxx' and similar.
E.g.,
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/google-parameter-vedxxxxx/
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/fatal-error-2-3-0/
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firefox-cookie-xxx-has-been-rejected-for-invalid-domain/
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/fatal-error-uncaught-valueerror-unknown-format-specifier-w/
This has the unfortunate side-effect of making the wordpress.org rank highly in Google for variations of 'xxx'; in the last month we got ~80,000 clicks for such terms.
This is problematic, as there's an obvious mismatch in intent, which might lead Google to believe that our site provides a poor user experience, which could negatively impact performance domain-wide.
To address this, I suggest that we:
- Entirely remove (rather than replace) sensitive string in URLs
- Replace sensitive strings in titles and body with [REDACTED] (rather than
xxx
and similar) - Retrospectively apply 2 (but not 1, to avoid breaking URLs) to existing forum threads.
Change History (5)
#4
@
4 months ago
Yeah, this isn't something WordPress.org does.
Most forum mods use [redacted]
or removed for privacy
.
I'm not sure there's anything really to do here, without proactively changing all instances of xxx
in all user-generated-content to be abc
or with multiplication signs.. neither of which seems appropriate to me.
Perhaps we could look at adding sensitive data redaction
which replaces /home/[^/]+/
with ellipse for logged out uses (and emails, and maybe even some URLs). We could also look at not having -xxx-
in slugs.
The x is just a typical replacement character used by the users.