New feature

[TheHolo.Net]

I have just finished installation of a new feature.

We now have a copy of all of our topics and forums in a text based format. This is mostly beneficial for search engine spidering, but could also come in handy for searching individual threads like the "Character Database" here in OOC with your browser's built in "find" function for specific text.

SWFans.Net <a href=archive/>Text Archive</a>

You will notice there are a few oddities with some of the forums in the way of broken images on some of the pages. I will attempt to resolve this wherever possible, but the way some of our styles are set up with images in place of forum names makes it very difficult.

The archival process is fully automated and will produce text based pages for all threads and replies as soon as they are made on the forums.

Thanks for your time and enjoy.

[TheHolo.Net]

I have done some appearance changes to how the pages are displayed and may do more as I get more time. I was also able to fix the broken images for all the styles that have functional images.

The Cizerack style is in desperate need of either being re-done, or having its old images provided to me so that I can put them in a place that they can be loaded from.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

^_^; I was in the process of trying to reskin the Ciz board, but I slammed against a wall of lack of inspiration.

[Sanis Prent]

I'm utterly clueless about style skinning :(

[TheHolo.Net]

Coolness!!!! AOL search bots are already crawling the new text/html copy of our forums.

:D

Oh! For people who may not understand why text/html pages like this are beneficial for webcrawler bots, let me explain a little.

Most automated web indexing bots (crawlers) do not index pages with dynamic URLs, making our PHP forums tough to get indexed in their entirety. Most Crawlers will index our Portal Page and our Main Forum Index, but that is really about all they will actually index, even if they follow links to other pages. Once a bot encounters a URL with a question mark, an equals sign, or many of the other symbols found in a large portion of our forum page URLs they will just ignore the page as if it doesn't exist.

The new Text/HTML archive, provides a conversion of our PHP pages into simple HTML, making all our threads indexable. :)

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Ah! It makes sense now! :D

[Dasquian Belargic]

It's so super for slow connections :D (altho it is showing me every forum, even if I can't access it... meant to do that? :huh)

[Garen Selore]

COOL! That should slow down a few headaches!

[Mortaniuss]

Originally posted by Dasquian Belargic
It's so super for slow connections :Dhttp://www.sw-fans.net/forum/index.php?referrerid=1&styleid=8 ?

[Dasquian Belargic]

I'm not on dial-up anymore, but even that was sluggish when I was

^_^; but good point

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Dasquian Belargic
It's so super for slow connections :D (altho it is showing me every forum, even if I can't access it... meant to do that? :huh) It appears that it only shows Mods (group mods and regular mods) all of the forums, but as you said it doesn't allow access (or viewing of thread titles). I will look into changing the permissions so that the private forums are invisible unless you have access.

As for speed issues, I haven't really noticed any myself, but I don't have lowband and webcrawlers don't either, which is this features primary benefit.

EDIT: The display of private forums to mods that do not have access has been fixed.

[TheHolo.Net]

Woooo hoooooooo!!!!!

Dozens of googlebots are currently crawling all over those archives. Our posts are getting indexed to be searchable on Google. :D :D :D

[Kelt Simoson]

HeHe go SW-fans :)

[Lilaena De'Ville]

it tickles!! :crack