The Old New Thing

February 18, 2008 - The Old New Thing

What's with all those spam ping-bots?

February 18, 2008 Feb 18, 2008 02/18/08
Raymond Chen
Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What's the deal with those pingback-bots? It's all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking. Step one: Register a bunch of...

Why does Explorer show a + sign even if there are no child folders?

February 18, 2008 Feb 18, 2008 02/18/08
Raymond Chen
Mike Williams asked in the Suggestion Box why Explorer shows a + sign next to a folder even though it doesn't have any children. Mind you, this wasn't a suggestion; it was just a random question. I don't enjoy answering random questions about specific details of user interface elements since, as it turns out, I did not write every single user...