The Stop Censorship app from CloudFlare shows your visitors that you are against SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), the proposed censorship legislation.
On their first visit, visitors will get a censored experience.
- Words longer than five characters will be blacked out.
- A “Censored” corner badge will appear at the top of your page.
SEO Friendly Protest against SOPA
During development, CloudFlare consulted with search engine crawl and rankings teams to ensure the way the blackout displays doesn’t negatively impact search engine optimization (SEO). The blackout bars are spans, and we avoid blacking out links, since hiding links on a background of the same color is a major no-no. Also, the links added to the page are marked with rel=”nofollow” to avoid passing any ranking. Because of CloudFlare’s scale, they regularly work with crawl and rankings teams at major search engines, so they were able to design the app to ensure that in doing good you don’t end up doing harm to your site.
Schedule
This app is scheduled to be available for one month. However, they will monitor the legislative changes and change the schedule as necessary.
Clear Message, Easy Advocacy against SOPA
Clicking a blacked out word, or the corner badge, opens an in-page window explaining that United States legislation (SOPA and PIPA) under consideration threatens freedom.
From the window, visitors may:
- tweet about your support for stopping censorship, including your Twitter handle, optionally (if no Twitter handle, your site URL is included)
- read more about SOPA & PIPA
- get their U.S. Senators’ phone numbers to register their concern directly (outside the U.S.? Still useful to register your concern)
Closing the window leaves your site ready for normal viewing. The corner badge remains, and will trigger the in-page window again if clicked. This experience will only occur on a single visit, based on a cookie set. (The link above is specially coded so you can test the first-run experience here repeatedly.)
Setup for CloudFlare Sites
Setup is simple. Go to CloudFlare.com and enable the Stop Censorship App, click “Manage” and then decide on the following three settings:
- Twitter handle - (Optional) Adding your Twitter handle will give your visitors an easy way to show their appreciation by including your Twitter username in the pre-filled Tweet. Without the Twitter handle, your site URL will be pre-filled in the Tweet.
- Badge position - Top right corner (default) or top left corner position for the black ribbon stripe that accompanies the black bars on the text.
In under a minute, the app will be live on your site, and your visitors will know your concerns about this proposed legislation, and join the fight.
Not on CloudFlare?
If your site is not on CloudFlare, you may get the code from GitHub.
Test On Your Site
Test this experience on your site by dragging the Stop Censorship bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar in your browser and clicking the link while on your site.
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