Getting Forum Php pages spidered (not happening!)

Are filenames the problem?

[Retireaway]

OK,I am working on a newish forum site which of course uses dynamic pages for the forum. Page rank is minimal, but interestingly getting good keyword placement on yahoo and msn, but google is an issue.

None of the engines appear to be getting into the forum pages at all! They spider the homepage (portal), direct links to static pages from there, and they spider the forum index page, but don't go any deeper.

Now, should I just be patient and work on link promotion, or is there a technical problem.
We have the filenames in the forum looking like this:
viewtopic.php?t=67

I read previously that this chokes the bots, is this really still true?

My partner suggesting we do an alternative dump to a static page database and just do a direct link to that. I don't like that idea because I am concerned they eventually will spider the forum pages and then it will be duplicate content.

Helpful suggestions most welcome!

I imagine this has been covered here before, but the search I did gleaned old posts, which I suspect are dated.

[GenerationTalk]

I use phpBB at Arcon5 and GenerationTalk, and both get spidered by the GoogleBot.

I think patience is the answer here. Get some inbound or internal links to threads in your forum as well as your website articles though.

Google can read URL's with parameters in.

About the duplicate thing, if you do that, then you could use.robot.txt (or robots.txt) file to tell robots not to visit the area the original forum is in.

[trinorthlighting]

I have a couple of php sites that was having issues. I found out that the html was causing issues with googlebot.

Once I fixed my coding and became w3c compliant, google picked the pages right up and indexed them.