> I find you insistence that in no normal circumstances could massl have
> a point (which is how I understand your replies to this thread) - a
> bit weird.

Firstly, I certainly did not intend to say massl could not have a
point under any circumstance. So apologies if I came across as
dismissive in any way.

> have you never clicked on a link in a forum/email/whatever
> and got part of the message appended to the url? here, try this one
> E.g.
>
> The book's full of useful info, it's all 
> herehttp://book.cakephp.org/view/875/x1-3-Collection/andguess what my
> space bar's a bit dicky.

I joined the discussion as I believed that Google would only pick up
on and score down a duplicate content link if one of its robots found
such a physical link.  Up until looking at the above example I could
not think of a situation where someone would accidentally add a
trailing slash and extra words to the end of a link.  But I can see
how that is entirely possible in the context of forums etc. and forget
that browsers/people can add trailing slashes to links (I'm not in the
habit of doing so myself, but should stop thinking people all use the
web the way I do).

> I find your opinion in this thread and massive overreaction to my
> example (seek out? I typed your nick in google and appended example
> texts to the first hit) contradictory/hypocritical. The main reason
> for using your own site was:
>
> 1) to demonstrate it's easily possible (out of curiosity why isn't
> your site using the stock pages controller?)
> 2) to demonstrate that you and google aren't the people with the
> 'control' to make the problem arise - which to me is the most
> important reason to consider defending against it.

To reply to a thread raising the issue of duplicate content and then
to see the next reply displaying links to my site, which created this
exact problem, made your reply seem very personal.  I firmly believe
others would have been surprised to see their websites used as an
example too.

Why didn't you reply to John Anderson or MilesJ in the same manner? I
know the answer to this is probably that I was the last person to post
when you replied, but John had taken a very similar line to me that if
the link did not exist in your site then Google would not index it and
Miles had questioned the depth of the problem too!

My initial reaction was a polite request for you to remove those
links, your response was a mocking no. By this point I was more
focused on the personal aspect of your replies than whatever point you
were attempting to make by posting the links in the first place.

1) Your demonstration, at the time, only proved that if you were
deliberately trying to type a link wrong you could and that Cake would
accept it, but I had not said no-one could type erroneous links, just
that people are likely to copy and paste them.  However I can now see
how typo's could occur and that someone could mount a malicious attack
against a site and that you should cover such eventualities

1a) I modified the pages controller to work in a CMS type manner, I am
guessing I have removed something that would help in this situation?

2) Yip, typos happen and malicious attacks are malicious and
untraceable to mere mortals.  My moral compass was overriding reality
when I mentioned reporting people.

> I'm sorry you feel you've been wronged it was just an example to
> clearly demonstrate the opposite of your message. Given you emailed me
> offlist (contrary to popular belief I don't sleep plugged into the
> internet) I see you really do feel strongly about it -

Yip, I did feel wronged as you picked on me alone when others has made
the same/similar points and to create examples of the problem being
discussed using my website can only be taken as directed towards me
individually, which has to be the definition of personal.

> which further
> confuses me as to why you insist massl's thread is to address a
> problem that doesn't exist (despite him requesting that whether it
> exists not be discussed)

I was wrong to say "I do no (sic) see how this is a problem", but I
was not the only one to say that.

massls request for the discussion to not go in this direction was
missed being at the bottom of his second post.  I picked up on this
later and have apologised, but our online differences aside (a side
effect of non verbal communication), I do feel as though it's been a
useful discussion to have.  I am here to learn and I'm therefore happy
to be corrected by anyone.

> However, to bring things back to the original point - IMO defending
> against malicious users isn't the main reason you'd consider the (same
> content - different url) problem.
>
> Here's some example urls that an app can easily generate, one way or
> another, and they'll all contain the same content:
>
> 1) You define some vanity/i18n routes, consider an action in a plugin
> controller:http://example.com/action/http://example.com/plugin/action/*http://example.com/plugin/plugin/action/http://example.com/plugin/plugin/action/something<-
>  massl's concern
>
> 2) You use 
> paginationhttp://example.com/controller/http://example.com/controller/index/http://example.com/controller/index/sort:id/http://example.com/controller/index/sort:created/http://example.com/controller/index/page:1/http://example.com/controller/index/page:1/sort:asc/http://example.com/controller/index/sort:asc/page:1/
> etc.

Clear exampled of duplicate urls, especially the pagination ones which
must exist in a lot of people's Cake apps

>
> If you insist that it's impossible for someone to maliciously or
> accidentally append something to a url which your code will ignore -
> you should at least consider how your own code is generating links.
> It's possible with some forethought to forgo the entire problem - by
> using a canonical metatag as lucca suggested and/or by using a
> component to apply some intelligent 301 redirect logic for you.

You're twisting my words as I never insisted it was impossible for
malicious action to result in this.  My views were:

"... neither you or a search engine would add extra unneeded
parameters to a link ..." TRUE

"... anyone linking to your pages is just going to copy/paste an
URL ..." in most cases will be true, but now understand that a link
could have a trailing slash and a dicky space bar could result in a
lengthened url

> * with latest 1.3 it doesn't automatically do/understand this any more

Good news, finishing my current app development before I then migrate
to 1.3 ... looking forward to it.

Paul.

P.S. Thanks for removing the links :o)

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