Seeking pages

A Seeking page gives people a place to say what they’re looking for and how someone else might help. That might be a collaborator, feedback on a project, or a hard-to-find part. Joshternet can bring those requests together while keeping the details and conversations on the websites where they belong.

The convention

Joshternet supports Joshua Morris’s /seeking convention. The original guide explains the page structure and markup; this chapter covers what Joshternet looks for and how it displays requests. Publishing a Seeking page is optional and does not change how your website participates in the network.

The underlying h-listing draft remains unfinished elsewhere on the web. Required page-level dates and optional request-level dates stay distinct here too—Joshternet does not treat every observed field as a finalized standard.

What Joshternet looks for

Publish your requests at /seeking or /seeking/, using ordinary language and a visible last-updated date. Mark each request as an h-listing with the action wanted, and put the request itself in e-description. Give visitors a public way to respond, either for the whole page or for an individual request.

Categories and additional details can help describe a request, but they are optional. Joshternet does not turn passing comments in articles into requests for help. Individual request cards come from explicitly marked requests, with links back to the page that published them.

See the minimal example in the original guide rather than maintaining a second copy here.

Published information	Joshternet’s use
h-listing and p-action="wanted"	Identify an explicit wanted request.
e-description	Supply the human-readable request statement.
Optional p-category	Provide publisher-supplied browsing labels.
Optional nested p-item	Describe the thing sought without replacing the request statement.
Page-level update date	Show when the publisher says the page changed.
Contact information	Remain available through the original website rather than becoming a Joshternet contact directory.

A listing’s u-url may be a mailto or other contact destination. Joshternet does not treat that URL as the request’s source permalink. Source links point at the Seeking page (and a real fragment when the listing element has an id).

Helping people find the page

An ordinary link from your website can help people and crawlers find your Seeking page. An existing slash-page index can point to it too. You do not need to add fields to /.well-known/josh, and finding the page does not guarantee that every request will appear in the explorer.

Joshternet looks for the known Seeking paths and links that identify those pages. It does not treat unrelated /contact, /about, or blog pages as Seeking sources merely because they contain words such as “wanted” or “looking.”

Keeping requests current

Keep a request on your page while you are still seeking it, and remove it when you are not. Update the page’s visible date when its contents change. Joshternet refreshes its view as it revisits the source, so changes may not appear immediately.

Joshternet keeps the source page’s updated time and the time of its own successful read as crawl metadata. The Seeking explorer does not show those dates. A failed visit does not mean that a request has been answered or withdrawn.

After a successful complete check confirms a request is gone, Joshternet removes it from the current explorer. If markup is unreadable or a crawl is incomplete, Joshternet records uncertainty rather than claiming the request was fulfilled. Requests can also leave the current display after 30 days without a successful complete check of their source. That freshness limit is Joshternet’s display policy, not a change to the Seeking convention.

Responding and privacy

Responses happen through the original website, using the contact method its publisher provides. Joshternet does not send messages, introduce people automatically or collect applications. Share only the details you intend to make public, and avoid including someone else’s private information.

A Seeking page is optional, and you can prevent its inclusion without withdrawing your website from Joshternet. The crawler-access guidance explains how to restrict access with robots.txt Disallow rules for cooperative crawlers, including Joshternet’s crawler. Changes affect Joshternet’s current display as its systems update; they cannot recall copies already made elsewhere.

How Joshternet publishes Seeking today

Seeking support is optional content discovery. Request text is extracted from eligible pages during network sync and kept out of committed content, topics, and search datasets. The public explorer at /seeking/ is prepared for current-only display: request bodies are not staged into Git with the hourly network update.

Locally, nlp:sync writes gitignored _data/seeking.json with the current requests so you can verify /seeking/ after a crawl. Uses public views also default on outside CI for the same reason. Production Pages builds from the committed tree still show an empty Seeking explorer until a separately reviewed publication path can deploy excerpts without committing them. That reduces unnecessary archiving; it does not guarantee that public requests can be erased from visitors’ copies, deployment artifacts, or external archives once they have been shown.