Opting Out

[Sleuth56]

Has there been any thought given to how a room admins or homeserver admins could opt out their room or server?
My thought would be some sort of state event in a room and the already standard X-Robots-Tag for servers.

I know this project is in very early stages but given the distributed nature of the matrix network I believe this to be a very important thing, especially coming from the matrix core team (Or at least that's who it looks like it's being driven by).

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Related MSC's:

• MSC2291
• MSC4021

[MadLittleMods]

The archive will only access rooms where the history is world_readable. A room can be public without world_readable history so there is already mechanism to sorta control this.

But it is possible that we add an additional signal/control to determine whether search engines should index it. I imagine that you would still be able to access the room via Matrix public archive but we would tell Google not to index the room if that signal is present.

[Mikaela]

Will removing world readability effect the archive or will the past history still be visible using it?

Is there any mechanism in Matrix for redacting the past public history that any room administrator can use without resorting to running bots/servers or unspecced hacks (m.room.retention and specced changing history visibility to members only and /upgraderoom 10)

[Mikaela]

Another concern is do tombstoned rooms automatically get excluded by both this and matrix-static? They may be inaccessible if they have weird join rules and no one to invite.

[MadLittleMods]

Will removing world readability effect the archive or will the past history still be visible using it?

@Mikaela I'm not sure exactly how the m.room.history_visibility lookup will happen exactly (current state or state at the time). It depends on that.

Is there any mechanism in Matrix for redacting the past public history [...]

Best to create an issue and ask elsewhere about this.

Another concern is do tombstoned rooms automatically get excluded by both this and matrix-static? They may be inaccessible if they have weird join rules and no one to invite.

Any world readable rooms, including tombstoned will be accessible. I don't have any details about the other project, matrix-static, for how it works around this.

[MadLittleMods]

Related to matrix-org/synapse#14127

[Cyberes]

I have a few rooms that are set to world_readable and published to my homeserver's room directory that I don't want to be on my public archive site. My solution was to simply ban the archive bot from those rooms. This really isn't a good solution because the rooms are still listed and when you try to view them you get an error page.

What if the archive backend was to query all the rooms to check if its bot has access? If it is banned from a room then it would remove that room from the list on the website.

I imagine this check would be in addition to whatever setting is used to opt-out.

[MadLittleMods]

@Cyberes The app is stateless so we can't just hold onto that kind of access/ban information across requests. It needs to be something we can query from the API and for the room directory, we wouldn't want to make a separate look-up for every single room we're trying to display in the grid so it needs to come from the room directory, /publicRooms endpoint.

A new state event like X-Robots-Tag/<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> that the issue description mentions seems like a good way to go. The room directory can relay this information just like it already does for join_rule and world_readable. A new MSC needs to be created for this though.

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If you can share the details, what's the distinction that your rooms should be public, world_readable but not accessible in the archive? Trying to understand the context/use-case.

[Cyberes]

The rooms that fit the public world_readable but excluded from the archive are all related to "server administration" such as announcements, the room for things relating to the homeserver, etc. It's fine if a user from another HS finds and joins those rooms but I'd rather not have their content public on the internet (you know what they say, "the internet never forgets" or whatever).

[paul90]

Really not sure about how fit for purpose using public world_readable is as a basis for inclusion in the archive. I'm going to assume that world_readable equates to Anyone in the Room Security & Privacy options in Element. So, if you want people to see content before joining the room it will get archived.

Changing the setting to Members only (since the point in time of selecting this option), but doesn't change the visibility of existing history. And, if @archive:matrix.org is still a member of the room?

At least for now, banning the bot seems like the only solution, but the resulting 403 is really doesn't look good for the archive.

[Mikaela]

So apparently when room is publicly joinable and only showing history for members, it may show history on archive.matrix.org for the first one who tries to access it, until a Draupnir/Mjolnir triggers and bans the bot which will stop subsequent visits to the page?

• https://matrix.to/#/%23furrytech%3Amatrix.org/%24IifH_2lqoP2raQ7wUSMZWBIWFvSRrSuHkyEKj9HONpM?via=777.tf&via=matrix.org&via=tedomum.net