Subdomain confusion

[Nodus]

You must be getting tired of my repeating issues with the new layout, but a quite serious problem was brought to my attention by NotBuyingIt, so let's dig into it once more:

Take a look at e.g. these sites. Compare the feedback pie charts, click the "Comments" button on each of them, and read some of the reviews:

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/googleblog.blogspot.com

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/youtube-global.blogspot.com

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/sketchupdate.blogspot.com

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/blogspot.com

... and so on, you can put any Google Blogger site you wish there.

What did you see? Did they look a little alike to each other? In fact, did they all look exactly identical? Oh yes they did, and there lies the problem.

Let me explain. In the old layout there was a selection of sites – mostly services like Google Blogger, which allow creation of subdomains for individuals, companies, communities etc. – for which you could write a review for each subdomain distinctively. Then there were other sites, where it was never possible to write a review for a subdomain. If you tried, the review "dropped down" to be seen on the base domain. (Actually I wrote about this once a couple of years ago, but I coudn't find that discussion now.)

Well, that's not the case anymore. Now each and every one of the reviews will "drop down" onto the base domain, including the old ones that were nicely separated in the old system. So, if you write a review for, say, googleblog.blogspot.com, the review will be seen there when you look at the reviews for youtube-global.blogspot.com, sketchupdate.blogspot.com, or any other Blogger site.

In the old system this was not as bad an issue as it is now, because each time you read or wrote a review for a subdomain which was dropped down onto the base domain, the name of the base domain was seen on the page header. But now if you read the reviews for googleblog.blogspot.com, the page header faithfully shows googleblog.blogspot.com, and still the actual reviews are all the ones that have been left for any Blogger site.

Now, what do you think when you read reviews for sketchupdate.blogspot.com, and there are reviews saying it contains tranny porn and viruses, and is involved in phishing? All those reviews were originally written for different Blogger subdomains, and they also showed up that way. There's even one review from me, and I can't tell anymore for which Blogger site I wrote that review in the first place.

If I was inclined towards melodrama, I would call this a disaster. Thanks for reading.

[Hayton]

Oh Lord. You're right. Y'know, this isn't going too well, is it?

I'll let our Canadian friend know, and he can break the bad news gently to SiteAdvisor. Or perhaps not gently at all.

I seem to remember, once upon a time, when I was learning the ropes, there was a thing called Testing. And somewhere in a distant part of the building there was a User Acceptance group, who would actually use the software the way it was going to be used. They would find things like this in the software before it was released into an unforgiving world. And this should have been noticed.

Many thanks to you both, NotBuyingIt and Nodus, for finding these flaws in the product. I had noticed something similar when rating a couple of sites recently, but didn't realise its significance.

[Hayton]

It gets worse. Go to the first message in the thread and click on the SiteAdvisor symbol and select 'View Site Report'. Do you go to the main Ratings page for "community.mcafee.com", as you would expect? Or does it take you off into the byways of individually-rateable threads?

In my old school reports it used to say (quite often) "Could do better".  Well, that's what I say about this. I'm being quite restrained.

[Nodus]

Hayton wrote:
It gets worse. Go to the first message in the thread and click on the SiteAdvisor symbol and select 'View Site Report'. Do you go to the main Ratings page for "community.mcafee.com", as you would expect? Or does it take you off into the byways of individually-rateable threads?

I haven't installed the software, if that's what you mean, so I can't see those symbols or tell where they would take me.

But other than that, comparing the ratings page for "community.mcafee.com" with the one for plain "mcafee.com" reveals that they actually are distinct ratings pages! Nobody has rated the community, but the main domain seems to contain 26 pages worth of user reviews.

What do you know. McAfee have separated their own subdomains to have them gather their own ratings, but haven't bothered doing the same to other domains with subdomains. So, it's not that they didn't know how it's done, they just haven't done it for some peculiar reason. Or what do I know, maybe there are some other similar domains, I just couldn't find any after a cursory search. But the question remains, what's holding them back from just separating the ratings for main domains and their subdomains once and for all. Would that create other problems? And do the old subdomain ratings hold any information of the subdomains they were originally meant for, so that they would still be separable?

In my old school reports it used to say (quite often) "Could do better".  Well, that's what I say about this. I'm being quite restrained.

Yeah, I guess we just have to wait and see if anyone will take these issues to heart. I didn't think I would say this, but the new interface begins to feel even messier than the old one.

I had noticed something similar when rating a couple of sites recently, but didn't realise its significance.

Exactly the same happened to me. After rating a subdomain I noticed the rating actually applied to the main domain, but since the old system had quite a similar flaw, it didn't come to my mind that also those subdomains you actually could rate distinctively earlier had lost that property in the new system (just not all of them, as we noticed). It's good NotBuyingIt was sharp-eyed enough.

[Hayton]

Nodus wrote:
Hayton wrote:
It gets worse. Go to the first message in the thread and click on the SiteAdvisor symbol and select 'View Site Report'. Do you go to the main Ratings page for "community.mcafee.com", as you would expect? Or does it take you off into the byways of individually-rateable threads?
I haven't installed the software, if that's what you mean, so I can't see those symbols or tell where they would take me.

Not sure what you mean by that. I meant, put "https://community.mcafee.com/message/293359#293359" into the address bar, and you position yourself at the start of this thread. Now, for anyone with SiteAdvisor installed, clicking on the Green SA icon/symbol/button (call it what you want) in order to view the 'community.mcafee.com' site report actually takes you to this page -

No reviews, note, although 'community.mcafee.com' should have reviews. And I can't see any way to find those earlier reviews now.

I entered a review into the comments page for https://community.mcafee.com/index.jspa as a test, and that now shows up in the page for that URL (above).

I repeated the test by entering a dummy comment into that URL's page, and that shows up in the list for community.mcafee.com

I'm not sure if that throws any light on the problem as it applies to blogspot.com (and others - wordpress.com?) but I think there's a connection there somewhere. How does SiteAdvisor recognise that a site actually is a sub-domain? Does it work simply by deconstructing a URL, or does it try to establish the relationship of the site page to the domain? I really don't know.

[Nodus]

Not sure what you mean by that. I meant, put "https://community.mcafee.com/message/293359#293359" into the address bar, and you position yourself at the start of this thread. Now, for anyone with SiteAdvisor installed,

That's exactly what I meant. I don't have SiteAdvisor installed.

No reviews, note, although 'community.mcafee.com' should have reviews. And I can't see any way to find those earlier reviews now.

Ok, so there should be old reviews. I was wondering about that, I assumed there would be.

And BTW, all that "message/293359#293359" or any other stuff after the domain name seems to be irrelevant on the whole, you will always end up to the same page despite that.

I'm not sure if that throws any light on the problem as it applies to blogspot.com (and others - wordpress.com?) but I think there's a connection there somewhere. How does SiteAdvisor recognise that a site actually is a sub-domain? Does it work simply by deconstructing a URL, or does it try to establish the relationship of the site page to the domain? I really don't know.

I don't know that either, but in the old system there were particular domains for which rating any subdomain was possible, and for the rest it was impossible. Blogspot.com was one of the possible ones, but there were many others. So, those domains were specifically programmed into the web application. And as community.mcafee.com now shows us, that seems to be the way it works now as well: the domains allowing subdomain rating have to be programmed into the system specifically. And now they have programmed mcafee.com to be one of those domains, whereas e.g. blogspot.com is not.

I once wrote a message about the pecularities of the old system in this respect. I don't seem to be able to find discussions that old. But I can assure you, it was complicated back then as well.

[Hayton]

I can't work out how SiteAdvisor rates a website as opposed to lower-level elements within that web site, but it obviously used to be able to make a distinction between web pages several levels down from a site's home page (related to each other and to higher-level pages), and sub-domains of sites such as blogspot.com which are independent of each other.

At least, that's what I gather from the response I got to the question of whether SiteAdvisor was behaving correctly with regard to the blogspot blogs. The gist is that it's not, and someone is going to investigate how it rates the blogspot sub-domains.

There was another question about the missing Review Site button on unrated sites, and I gather that's going to be corrected.

[Nodus]

With the old system I actually had a list of sites that allowed rating for subdomains. By that time I had already collected a few dozen sites like that. I think I still have the list somewhere, should someone be interested.

In addition to that I also had a list of sites that did allow rating for subdomains, but only if you rated them individually. If you used the bulk rating tool instead, those ratings would "drop down" onto the base domain.

So, it's not all that simple, there were a lot of this kind of quirks back then, and I kept those lists to help me to remember exactly in what way I should post a comment so that it would end up to the correct place – or to realize that I simply couldn't rate a particular subdomain at all. Of course I learned about new sites all the time, so it tended to be quite time consuming. I hope the new system won't appear to have inherited all that kind of bad properties after these current problems have been resolved.

[Gruwup]

This is more of a statement of familiarity and process rather than a question. I composed a Google forums content posting a while back just in case and when indeed eventually there would be an issue on how to handle the evaluation of this type of URL addressing. 

This is a very specific type of URL addressing that was created by the developers of the internet, DARPA, and is valid.

It is not malformed URL addressing intended to trick the user into believing the URL is an address of authentic use directed traffic of mainstream naming identity.  

Meaning.. the use of facebook.com within a URL prefix does not imply the URL itself points to facebook.com

Please reference:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/2306768/introduction-and-how-dynamic-subdomain-url-addr...

---

This Post At Support.Google.Com has a spoken voice narrative transcription available at:

http://mcafee.webdomains.realuphuman.net/google.com/support.google.com/Introduction-and-how-dynamic-...

This is a very specific type of URL addressing that uses the same exact syntax and character set that email addresses are constructed from left side of the iternet domain name. 

As is the construction of the syntax for an internet email address is digital object #1, a very long prefix defined namespace for email also applies to data URL pointers left of the URL of the pointer filename.

An example...

Http://To-Be-Or-Not-To-Be.facebook.com.That-Is-The-Question.music.gruwup.net/Mad-World/

This mode is normally not processed and creates an error 404 on internet configuration servers.

More than 90% of the internet traffic website administrators have this feature turned off to disallow this syntax.

But when this feature is turned on does not imply that the URL configuration is maladjusted or malcode or malicious in any way shape or form. 

I would hope that this post here serves that the content that is served on my Internet domain spaces as a live life journal does not create in the evaluation that the content is unsafe for the public to consume. 

Thank You