Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Recently I have got hold of some software for a chat forum, no where near as complex as this but ... what is webmasters view on chat baords / forums? If you have a definite visiting public is it worth while to give them some "interactive toys" to play with instead of byeing your products?
Does google like chat forum software or is it a banable offence. I am not sure if this will be editted out but the one I am trying is called Discussware. Anyone have any experience of it?
Hope to hear from some of you wise members about this :)
Has Google banned WebmasterWorld?
You can get into all kinds of issues with forum software, first most of them operate on a purely dynamic basis.
They are resource consumers.
Then you have folks trying to use your forums to pass PR etc., or point to bad locations on the web.
They have been known to present multiple paths for the l33t to get onto your servers.
Do your homework first.
Nope it was Brett that did that with his robots.txt All is back to normal though. I did a search for ... does matt cutts talk out his bum ... and yes, WebmasterWorld came up first. :)
>You can get into all kinds of issues with forum software, first most of them operate on a purely dynamic basis.
Yup thats the idea really give folks something to play with. Users love being able to press buttons
>They are resource consumers.
Hmm ... not so good
>Then you have folks trying to use your forums to pass PR etc., or point to bad locations on the web.
Ah yes of course the trolls of the world. So in your mind Bear do you think it would be better to not allow it to be indexed? If this were the case and an unmoderated free for all linked out to dodgy places on the net, does taking it out of the index via robots.txt mean the site will not be penalised?
Just thinking as I am typing this maybe a very good reason NOT to put a forum up.
>They have been known to present multiple paths for the l33t to get onto your servers.
Unclear what you mean here dude can you expand a bit?
>Do your homework first.
Hmm thats what I is tring now. Anyone else with any experience of forum publishing and the do's and donts would love to hear from you as well.
>>You can get into all kinds of issues with forum software, first most of them operate on a purely dynamic basis.
>Yup thats the idea really give folks something to play with. Users love being able to press buttons
What I mean by dynamic is that the pages are usually built on the fly and the same page may appear under multiple URLs ... here you should be reading duplicate content.
>>They are resource consumers.
>Hmm ... not so good
In itself this isn't really a problem it just has to be planned for and resource usage monitored. There are two related problems that can result from failing to plan and monitor.
1. System becomes too slow for your site's primary purpose.
2. System becomes too slow to keep your button pushers happy and they complain both on and off your site. forum junkies are a different breed of bear. They can help as viral marketeers or they can throw a spanner in the works.
The need to provide horsepower to drive a large forum can lead to hard dollar expenditures. You need to keep in mind that normally robots are going to be major visitors to the forums. Some robot throttling may be called for.
I think you have seen Brett complaining about bots you might also want to visit some of the blogs on blogspot etc.. incredibill is saying a lot of what most folks have only been thinking.
>>Then you have folks trying to use your forums to pass PR etc., or point to bad locations on the web.
>Ah yes of course the trolls of the world. So in your mind Bear do you think it would be better to not allow it to be indexed? If this were the case and an unmoderated free for all linked out to dodgy places on the net, does taking it out of the index via robots.txt mean the site wilpenalizedpenalised?
You need to have control of the links your forum visitors put in their postings, not all forum software handles that.
>Just thinking as I am typing this maybe a very good reason NOT to put a forum up.
No just something that needs to be planned for before it becomes a problem.
>>They have been known to present multiple paths for the l33t to get onto your servers.
>Unclear what you mean here dude can you expand a bit?
The l33t = elite or so they think hackers/crackers, forum software presents additional possible means to break into your site/server.
I will go and try to digest some before getting back to you again as there is a very large amount of what i think is good quality info and advise.
Thanks again dude
/offers a high five to the big hairy guy
My main potential cause of consern was this tbh. Now have sent 1 email to sales and got a good technical reply to it telling me in pretty straitforward (for a geek) language what files to edit to stop links being posted.
Once again thanks fo the heads up bear ... the testing now continues.
If your worried about users posting external links then just edit the forum software to rewrite the links with the rel="nofollow" attribute.
LOL, thebear, so I went to dig up that incredibill thing, found the site, and lo and behold, blogspot is not functioning at all. Too funny.
These big db things, slower and slower, I'm seeing this issue more and more on sites around the web, they are almost all dynamic db driven now, you can totally tell.
The forum link spam issues are easy to solve if you look into it. Many good solutions and options, just depends on which route you want to go.
The odds of a newbie making the right setup decisions and seo changes and bot protection and all that, I'd put them close to zero, so new forum creators will probably have to accept a learning curve, mistakes, indexing messups.
One piece of advice I'd give: look very closely at WebmasterWorld forums, they are absolute gems, it's all done very well. Look at pages, then go to other forums software and compare. Any forum can be made to be good, I assume anyway, but it doesn't happen by itself. I don't know of any default install that really does a good job currently. Check out punbbb if you want a slick slim low resource hogging piece of software. I haven't used it, but I'm very tempted, their forums are very fast, noticeably faster than anything out there. It's still young though. I might beta test that next year I think.
Don't worry too much about resources, that's not an issue on a good shared hoster until you get to fairly high traffic levels. Then it's time to go dedicated probably.
That is an issue one needs to deal with, it is easier to lock down some systems than other ones.
Keeping a forum on another server prvents someone from compromising your primary system through the forum system.
This is a risk analysis job that you should do and depending on the outcome of that analysis you may be able to tolerate the risk of having the forum on your primary system or you may not.
2by4,
What blogspot was kind of out of it when you went a calling? Maybe Bill saw you coming looking like Googlebot on a non Google ip and the auto nailer just spiked your browser.
As for DB based websites, there sure are a few out there. I may even work on one, yup in fact there is more than one DB involved. They sure can chew up servers.
I agree Brett's beast here is a good model. But we won't tell him, as he will have trouble walking through the doorways at work ;-).
In general everything is a tradeoff.
Where called for a DB based system is just the thing and then in another instance it is both overkill and a server burden.
