I was researching a Hugo feature here on the forum and came across a hugodocs.info link. I know that the ‘Hugo docs project’ is already finished, but apparently someone now uses hugodocs.info as a spam/redirect domain.
When I followed one of the dozens of links to that domain here on the forum, I came across:
A regular ‘this domain is for sale’ page, which is not that bad (although I’d not trust that JavaScript on there).
A ‘congratulations you won 1,500 euros shopping credit’ page.
An offline page (redirect timeout).
And a ‘too many requests’ error, when I tried to refresh often to see where I’d end up .
This is not good, obviously:
It gives a bad user experience that people on the forum here link to a domain that is now spammy.
The forum might expose people to sites with untrustworthy JavaScript.
And there are likely SEO disadvantages for gohugo.io to provide do-follow links to a spammy domain.
@rdwatters, is this domain still under your control? If so, can you change the DNS settings so that the domain is completely offline? That’s easier to do than if a moderator has to edit all existing posts.
If it were under my control, there wouldn’t be a spam and redirect page, obviously
I also don’t have quit the same permissions level I used to have on these forums. But I’m happy to do a search and edit and update any of my posts that include references to that domain.
As it turns out, I am not able to edit old posts and can only delete the full posts from threads. This is less effort for me, but I wonder if deleting whole sale is throwing the baby out with the bathwater…
@rdwatters I upgraded your account to a Level 3 regular.
Now you should be able to edit your old posts and remove those references.
Also you should be able to undelete any of your old posts.
If there are more links to that domain by other users then just flag those posts and either me or one of the others will take care of the problem with those links.
Oh great. I edited several posts by various users to remove the hugodocs.info links and Discourse has bumped these really old threads at the top of the forum…
Anyway there is not much more I can do about it. Fixed it.
In any case @rdwatters I went out of my way to remove those links that you couldn’t edit yourself, since they were made by other people.
In most cases I have simply changed the links to their counterparts in the official docs that reside at gohugo.io
When context needed it I simple wrapped the hugodocs links with backticks so that the conversation still makes sense and at the same time there is no link to that domain anymore.
From what I’ve seen your Level 3 privileges are now locked so you should be able to edit your old posts to remove all forum references of the old domain that is now used by a spammer.
You are once again a Moderator of this Forum so now you can edit those posts.
Also whenever you edit the last post of an old topic make sure to Reset the Bump Date because otherwise these old topics will show up at the top of the Forum.
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