Re: test.openeuphoria.org is open to the world
- Posted by CoJaBo2 Jan 16, 2013
- 1476 views
Yeah...I'm not sure why this is important. The test site is mainly an old copy of the production version of the site, plus whatever other testing we've done. It's sometimes convenient to try to make a post that causes an error and then link that in a ticket.
Seriously, though, what's the down side of having it accessible? Note that the source code is accessible, too.
The risk of having it accessable is that, as a copy of the production site, it looks like the production site. Someone coming in from elsewhere or linking to it may not notice the difference.
Obviously, the password would be public and well documented, so that anyone and everyone human could continue to access the test site.
HTTP auth (probably the simplest way of doing it) allows displaying a short message; which could simply say "Development site, for testing only, password is 'developer', please report any bugs found to , etc". This would have the desired effect of making it pretty obvious the site is not intended for general use, while keeping it open for testing.
Why would we want to bother with that? Who cares about the search engine validity regarding the test site?
Because otherwise, people coming in to the site would suddenly start getting password prompts, because other sites will still be linking to the test site as if it were the real one. Blocking it in robots.txt would stop search engines from listing it in the future, but it wouldn't automatically fix up any other sites or directories that will continue to link to the wrong version. Changing to "dev." instead of "test." for the development site, and redirecting "test." to the main site would resolve that with the least disruption. "dev." could be used as the new testing site, and accidental links to "test." would not break.
