Montreal – March 11, 2020 – While the “Tinder” app recently made headlines for its Coronavirus prevention message to its users, another, more discreet company had already created through WordPress, an original global support movement by spreading a message of hope through the collaboration of its thousands of users.
In early March, a Canadian company, “PAGUP”, specializing in the design of WordPress (CMS) Plugins (programs to execute specific functionalities on a website), deployed a small feature through one of them, “Better-Robots.txt”, allowing its users to display a message of support in their respective robots.txt (monsiteweb.com/robots.txt) for all people directly affected by this virus.
Upon approval of its users, the plugin in question, whose main function is to create a robots.txt (a file essentially containing instructions intended for search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo,… – and crawlers), adding, with no consequences whatsoever for the targeted website, a message consisting of both a warning (geek humor) against the Virus “TO CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19, DO NOT CRAWL & INDEX HUMANITY” (compared here to a traditional robot / crawler) but also health advice for everyone (washing hands, wearing a mask, etc.).
The message ends with a note of hope: “Never give up! We will come out of this stronger ”. See here: https://better-robots.com/robots.txt
# TO CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19, DO NOT CRAWL & INDEX HUMANITY.
User-agent: Coronavirus/Covid-19
Disallow: /
# To you, who will maybe read this message: WASH your hands frequently, AVOID touching eyes, nose and mouth, PRACTICE respiratory hygiene and NEVER GIVE UP!
# We will come out of this stronger.
This message (available in 5 languages), which looks more like a bottle in the sea, was voluntarily deployed by several tens of thousands of users and website owners from around the world (USA, France, Canada, England, Spain, Sweden, …) as a sign of support, and continues its spread on a regular basis.
An initiative that has been welcomed by many Internet users and which is becoming more and more popular.
For more information:
- Want to try this plugin and be part of this Movement? https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-robots-txt/
- https://pagup.com/ (the company making these plugins)
- https://pagup.com/robots.txt (their robots.txt used by thousands of websites)
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