I don't think it's a realistic expectation that other people will help you gatekeep these links. I get that you wanted to stop your personal site from being spidered and I think deobfuscating that wasn't cool. But a link to someone else's very well known personal site...? I don't see how it's even your business if that gets spidered?
I imagine the other commenters felt asking us to do these string operations was disrespectful to our time and security theater that wouldn't stop spiders anyhow. My suggestion in the future would be that, if you want to control how a link is shared or accessed, put it behind HTTP basic auth or something and revoke access when and if you see fit. Or tell people you'll share the source if they email you. Or anything else that isn't so trivially defeated that it's practically begging to be.
So you do understand why I did it. It will kill many, not all, automated tools using this HN content, and human beings actually interested will put the little time required.
It makes me remember the time when I was some IRC channels related to security: we had a try at chatting using "sound based" writting (a bit like SMS/text), only very suspicious accounts were against it (many knew each other IRL).
I wasn't there but another reading might be that in both cases people resisted these efforts to obfuscate because they valued a frictionless clarity and the obfuscation interfered with their participation? I can't speak for this IRC community but on HN people will definitely resist obfuscation for that reason.
I'm not sure what to tell you. People don't necessarily want to decipher these riddles. If you want to communicate that way it's your right. But I don't anticipate it being well received by this community.
I don't think it's a realistic expectation that other people will help you gatekeep these links. I get that you wanted to stop your personal site from being spidered and I think deobfuscating that wasn't cool. But a link to someone else's very well known personal site...? I don't see how it's even your business if that gets spidered?
I imagine the other commenters felt asking us to do these string operations was disrespectful to our time and security theater that wouldn't stop spiders anyhow. My suggestion in the future would be that, if you want to control how a link is shared or accessed, put it behind HTTP basic auth or something and revoke access when and if you see fit. Or tell people you'll share the source if they email you. Or anything else that isn't so trivially defeated that it's practically begging to be.
So you do understand why I did it. It will kill many, not all, automated tools using this HN content, and human beings actually interested will put the little time required.
It makes me remember the time when I was some IRC channels related to security: we had a try at chatting using "sound based" writting (a bit like SMS/text), only very suspicious accounts were against it (many knew each other IRL).
I wasn't there but another reading might be that in both cases people resisted these efforts to obfuscate because they valued a frictionless clarity and the obfuscation interfered with their participation? I can't speak for this IRC community but on HN people will definitely resist obfuscation for that reason.
????
I'm not sure what to tell you. People don't necessarily want to decipher these riddles. If you want to communicate that way it's your right. But I don't anticipate it being well received by this community.