The upcoming #faircamp release will feature "unlisted releases", that is, you can add the flag "unlisted" to the release manifest/section to hide it from all publicly accessible pages, while still being able to visit the page if you know the permalink.
There are some minor implications for label mode though, which I'd be happy to have double-checked - if you're a (current or potential) faircamp site operator, do you have any thoughts on this?
"An unlisted release is never visible on the home/index page.
In label mode there are some additional intricacies: An artist that has only unlisted releases is not visible on the home/index page, but in turn, all of these unlisted releases are visible on the artist page, as the artist page itself is implicitly unlisted then. If however, an artist has even just a single listed release, it becomes visible on the home/index page, and on the artist page itself all unlisted releases are not visible anymore."
@freebliss I think it's correct if the artist is not visible if there are only unlisted releases.
If it was visible with unlisted releases only, and the releases were hidden, it wouldn't make sense to see an empty page anyway, I guess.
On the other hand:
I don't know how this is programmed, but maybe the #artist "object" could be seen in the same way as a "listed release" in order to make the artist visible in the home and have a page with no visible releases, as some kind of presentation.
@LucaManciniDrummer I think I get what you mean, no worries :) and yes it'd be technically possible to feature the artist with no releases at all! My thinking for not doing it for now was that if a label adds a new release with a new artist, and for a sort of "test phase" only adds it as an unlisted release, it would probably be undesirable for the artist to show up already (it kinda gives away the release coming up via the artist showing up before the release does). I guess we'll see if the behavior makes sense, otherwise someone will let me know, I hope. :D
@lislegaard Good question, my thinking is that as long these sites are not publicly linked anywhere (and from faircamp's side they aren't), no crawler should be able to even find them. (in a way any mention in a robots.txt or similar would only enable it to be crawled in the first place :))
@freebliss@lislegaard it might be tricky to keep a link from being crawled though. I can imagine use cases for this that would result in a crawl, eg asking for peer critique by posting the unlisted album to a small forum or emailing it to a friend who uses big G services.
@dried@lislegaard True, technically I can see both happening. I see a rationale though why a robots.txt approach might be counterproductive:
If faircamp used robots.txt to indicate unlisted releases to crawlers (as in "please don't crawl this"), it simultaneously provides a standardized way for any individual to check which unlisted releases any given faircamp site has in store (!) ... to me this sounds way more problematic.
I'd consider unlisted releases more of an uncomplicated way to temporarily (pre-)share something that then anyway either goes public or entirely off the web again. In that sense I feel like even if a rare¹ "leak" to a search engine happens, that is maybe negligible anyhow, given the odds and the context? (Or put another way, actually confidential material is better shared via encrypted and or password-protected channels anyway)
¹Consider the likelyhood here: Email provider crawls privately shared link in email or in small forum, that link happens to actually achieve a high-enough SEO ranking, someone randomly hits the right search terms, and that someone randomly happens to have any understanding or interest in what they just found, and they find it before the thing goes public or is removed again anyway - lots of coincidences
@freebliss@lislegaard I think using the noindex meta tag is the right solution for this, not robots.txt. Regardless of the likelihood of the crawl-index-leak scenario, I still think it's intuitive that if something is described as unlisted then it indicates that it does not want to be listed (ie, indexed). I don't think there's a downside to using the meta tag, but if something ends up in Google's index db it can be a headache to get it removed or even updated (been there before with clients).
@dried@lislegaard Hell yeah that sounds perfect! Will add noindex tags (also for download pages actually, same issue), I wasn't aware of that option, thanks for pointing it out! :)
@freebliss@lislegaard otherwise I think it should be made clear to users that the page could still end up in search results and that "unindexed" only means that it's not linked from the rest of the faircamp site.
You're right that this isn't a substitute for properly private communication. Maybe it's not clear whether an unindexed release is supposed to be a staging / preview page or a production page that is simply independent from the site... tricky.
@dried@lislegaard Let's see how people will pick it up :) I'm basing my expectations roughly on how people understand and work with Youtube's "Unlisted Videos" (my impression: that works quite well, or I missed the scandals haha ^^)
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