Forum "archive" now installed

[admin (no pm's please)]

At the bottom of each page you will now see a link to an "archive" of your forum.
This presents a view of your forum that is free of all functionality apart from the ability to read it. Since this means there is very little text aside from the posts themselves presented as long pages ignoring your usual topic/forum pagination, then search engines stand more of a chance of rating these pages highly.

If a punter gets to the page via a search engine, then a simple link takes them to the main forum.


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[Tibbittz]

Cool, I like this hack/mod. Thanks.
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[scot swift]

many thanks this is a useful tool to have on the forum many thanks again

[Lara'sCult]

Ahh, we had wondered what the archives purpose was.
Great plan. :thumright:

[admin (no pm's please)]

I am still waiting for these to show up with search engines. But you have to anticipate some lag.
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[SweetSour]

I've just been having a look at the archive on my forum and I notice that the text is in a white font, which makes it a bit tricky to read! I imagine this is because my normal forum template has white text on a black background. However, on the archive you don't get the black background so it's white text on an off-white background... challenging for the eyes!

admin, I know you're on your well-deserved Christmas holidays so I'm certainly not expecting you to look into this now. I just wondered if there's anything you can do about this when you're back in 2006, please?

Ooops, forgot to say... my forum is:
http://mychemicalromance.myfreeforum.org
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[admin (no pm's please)]

You will probably need to hit refresh, but this is now fixed. Seems the stylesheet did not specify font color properly.
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[SweetSour]

Oh wow!! Thank you very much for fixing that - I really wasn't expecting you to look at it so quickly.
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[admin (no pm's please)]

No problem, just hope the archive starts showing in google soon. Progress seems slower that i was hoping
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[Owl Mirror]

[admin (no pm's please)]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Just looked at some search results and I see evidence of google getting beyond the index page of the archive and into the forum pages. Obviously it will need to get down another level to be of real use.
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[admin (no pm's please)]

and now some actual threads appearing Can only be good
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Just did a search:

"Scotland Brewery Field"

and got the link high in the results:

http://bridgendravens.myfreeforum...cotland-at-the-brewery-field.html

This shows that if you get the strong keyword text in thread title, then the archive system is liable to be very effective!
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Another small change (which is compataible with anything search engines have scanned already).

I have moved the topic titles to the front of the URLS in the archive. e.g.

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/arch...xp-home-edition__o_t__t_1505.html

rather than:

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/arch...ry-with-dell-xp-home-edition.html

search engines rate thing left to right in terms of decreasing importance.

This is a small change, but with search engines, every little helps.
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