yeah i'm 50 so i bet you are about ten years younger! i always lusted for a calculator watch, still never had one!!!

thanks for you help man, i'm not really looking for a solution today, just throwing out some good hard data to get it better understood for future versions, which Rick has said he will do.

here's some info from the spider expert if anyone is interested:
=============================

We made several attempts and did some thorough looking at the problem. I think
we were able to track down the core of the problem, but there doesn't seem
to be any easy solution to this.

The problem is largely (if not, completely) caused by the new URLs used by
UBB and the way it is passing extra parameters in the URL to track how a
user got to a thread (ie: from which forum index etc.). There's also a lot
of inconsistent naming or varying parameters which mean similar things. I
can't see how this new version of UBB can be very friendly to search engines - it just gives out too many different URLs to the exact same page.

Indexing gives me lots of the message posts, but with duplication.

Here's the crux of it:

The forum indexes are accessed as such:
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/postlist/Board/1/page/0
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/postlist/Board/1/page/1
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/postlist/Board/1/page/2

These URLs are important and we need to index them. They are the listing of
threads for one of the forums ("Board/1") and each of the pages contain
different threads. We need to crawl these indexes to find the threads, so we
can't simply skip "page/1" etc. Note in the above, "page/0" is the same as
"page/1". Yet if we skip "page/0", we might not find a "page/1" link given
by UBB, and miss a forum.

Now, when you click on a thread from, let's say page 1 of the above board,
what it actually does is, it carries across the "page/1" part of the URL, in
order to remember where it came from. So you get the following:
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/349/page/1
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/349/page/1/fpart/1
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/349/page/1/fpart/2
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/349/page/1/fpart/3

All of these go to the same thread, with "fpart/2" and "fpart/3" pointing to
the 2nd and 3rd pages of that thread.

But if this thread was linked from the second page of the board index, it
would have URLs like:
http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/349/page/2/fpart/1

And that's the problem. The page parameter is merely a tracking mechanism.
It doesn't actually change the page, and yet it can be anything. It makes it
impossible to determine if the pages are the same.

The idea of simply skipping "page/2" and "page/3" etc. won't work. This is
because you'd then be skipping all threads which were only linked from the
second and 3rd pages of the forum index.

To me, it would seem to be a flaw in the design of the URL naming method in
UBB. Google, Yahoo, etc. would all be looking at many many versions of the
same page with URLs like these. They might be filtering some out based on a
percentage of how similar they are, but it can't rate well in terms of
PageRank when this happens.

We provide a method of detecting duplicate pages but it is useless here
because the same page looks different on each load (due to the chatbox on
the side and also the "Generated in x seconds" message down the bottom).

So is there any solution? This is what comes to mind:

- If there was an option within UBB to turn off the feature of remembering
which page of the forum index you came from (so that it would drop the
"page/x" parameter in all the "showflat" thread URLs), then this would cure
it.