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Will GForum 2 be SE friendly?

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Will GForum 2 be SE friendly?
Will GForum 2 be search engine friendly or will it have to be adapted with rewrite rules like 1.2.3?

The reason I ask is that my previous forum had SEO built-in and we received quite a lot of traffic from it. Since changing to GForum 1.2.3 in Feb 06 I have tried and failed on many occasions to integrate the rewrite rules but no matter what I do I can't get them to work. As a result our traffic has dropped by around 50% and I'm desperate to get this thing back up and running again. I'm willing to wait for GF2 if SEO is integrated rather than spend any more time trying to get GF 1.2.3. to work.
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Re: [MJB] Will GForum 2 be SE friendly? In reply to
I believe GT will delivery another outstanding product with GF 2. Truth is the forums have worked so well that they where able to upgrade everything else first, which we will benefit from in the future.

Think about it if the redid gt forums a year or two ago... then they would have missed some great technology updates.

Think about it. more then half the world is still on dial up, yet every message board system out their is bulky. Have you ever tried to view a 100k page with a 56k modem?

Its like downloading a 5-10 meg file for every page.

If GT pulls off the Luna css set on this forum, it will drop the page size at least in half.... which will help you steal visitors from the bulky other boards out there. Granted there are some really cool features out there on other boards, some of which are really not needed.

I hope GT gets us CSS, SE friendly and one cool plug-in would be some sort of adsense yahoo plug-in rev share.

That would post an ad after the first post or last post and which we could then share revenue with other members.

I saw one board that rotates that ad spot with their members. after they posted 100 or so messages. This way your members who help out the board the most will get rewarded for posting and replying to messages on your forums. And when people are making money from your site, they are going to stick closely with you and the site.
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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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