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Have you ever noticed, in the log files of your website, a recurring 404 error that looks like this:

https://gadlab.net/humans.txt
https://gadlab.net/humans.txt
https://gadlab.net/humans.txt

At first glance, you might think that it’s a few budding geeks having fun finding THE flaw in your site, or a robot looking for information that isn’t there where it should be.

But a little digging reveals something quite different…

A «new» trend

If you search the web for the keyword “humans.txt”, you’ll find that a certain amount of literature exists on the subject, and that you can indeed find a link to the “robots.txt” file. But instead of telling robots which pages to crawl (or not to crawl), humans.txt provides information about the people and techniques behind the site.

It’s an initiative whose aim is to find out who’s behind a website. It’s a TXT file containing information about the various people who have contributed to the site’s construction.

This idea is quite interesting, and potentially useful, if the same information isn’t already available in a “Contact” or “About” page.

Create your own “humans.txt

Why should you? Because it’s quick and easy to do. Because it has no impact on the code. Quite often, site owners don’t want to

About humans.txt

An initiative to know the creators of the website. Contains the information about humans to the web building.

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Pierre-Yves Gadina

Fascinated by the interaction between man and machine, and by the concrete solutions provided by design through electronic media, I've been specializing in online communication for over 20 years.