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Re: [MJB] Will GForum 2 be SE friendly?

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Re: [MJB] Will GForum 2 be SE friendly? In reply to
GForum is extremely search engine friendly, and the "stock" rewrite rules work really well. If you are having problems, maybe they can be solved with a little effort.

I use the rewrite rules in the server config, not the directory, so there may be some differences in syntax, but we've had better luck with GFOrum and the search engines than almost anything else. Even new forums, or new topics show up in searches fairly quickly.

I made a small mod to a sub in GLinks, and got the same sort of SE friendly responses with the longer URL's. Still, not as good as the GFOrum stuff, but pretty close. In some searches (that I care about) we come up 8 of the top 10, maybe not #1, but 3 or 4 of the top 5.

As pointed out, GT came up with a real winner in GF, right off the bat, and it's not needed a lot of work to be stable, and usable, for years. It's light weight, and has stood the test of time. Flash isn't as important -- if you look at the brain-dead input fields some very popular services use, GForum looks like high-tech slick.

I find most other forums annoying to the extreme. I hate wading through grapics, and misaligned text, and garish colors, and all the things people do to the messages. GForum has balanced features with interface, and it works. Sure, there are some things that would make GF better, but it needs to remain an alternative to all the bloated boards, and a more serious alternative to the "pop culture". Code bloat is a problem, and GForum has resisted that, keeping the core features of communication/messaging and not trying to be a blog, photo gallery, file system, newsgroup reader, and such.

"FORUMS" are supposed to be about oration, and communication. The more distractions, less the message is communicated. It's the difference between DATA and INFORMATION.

I've been integrating some formatting for GF into the GLinks luna.css, especially for headers, and colors. It would be really nice to have one "main" css file, to control the whole site, with includes to specifically handle features specific to one program or the other. It's really nice to be able to upload GForum, and by uploading my local template set, have it look like the rest of the site immediately. I've got the GForum templates wrapped in GLinks header/footers on some sites, and it works nice.

Having all the programs working out of the same "static" directory, and sharing themes, would be really "cool" :)


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Subject Author Views Date
Thread Will GForum 2 be SE friendly? MJB 6495 Aug 16, 2006, 3:24 PM
Post Re: [MJB] Will GForum 2 be SE friendly?
carminejg3 6319 Aug 18, 2006, 12:17 PM
Post Re: [MJB] Will GForum 2 be SE friendly?
pugdog 6235 Dec 11, 2006, 3:05 PM