UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Version 7 Support New Members?

Hello all.

We haven't been getting many new members. We've only got two (one of whom i suspect to be a troll who was previously banned). We haven't been getting much web traffic at all. I understand that this is because our new updated forum in 7.5 has not yet been fully loaded into the search engines -- google, yahoo etc. And I understand that it'll be some time before our new forum gets the web traffic that we used to get.

Can anyone estimate how long this situation will last? We used to be getting 50 or 80 "recent visitors." Now we're only getting 4 or 8 total showing up in the 'who's onlne' box.

We've been updated for almost two months now.

Granted i'm still very confident that upgrading was absolutely the way to go. I'm merely getting a little curious about when we can expect to see the benefits. (thanks again to all who've been a great help in the past.)

Question 2


Would it be wise to turn off the CAPTCHA, 'email verification' and or 'unique email' controls for a while till things pick back up?

I would, of course, turn them right back on at the first sign of trouble.

thanks again for your help

It probably is, due to the forum has a different url now.
Did you utilize the redirect scripts from the import? That may help with users/bots/etc that have the old url bookmarked.
Or you could create a custom 404 error page that redirects to the new forum url.
If you have access to the server logs you would see this error for someone that requests a page that does not exist anymore.
Then at least you could confirm someone is attempting to visit the site but was not successful due to a bad url.

Then also resubmitting to the search engines is another path.

Thanks, Ruben.

No, i did not. And as i read your post i'm reminded that someone had already recommended that i do that. Perhaps it was you.

I should've looked in to doing that. But i never got around to it.

Not trying to plug anything but Gizmo also has a pay for use sitemap script that may help speed up things.
But for the best bang for the buck you would still need to submit the site maps to the search engines to kick start them.

Well, the new url would cause a slowdown until things start getting crawled; you could try a sitemap and feed urls to google (you could make one manually, or with a 3rd party script such as my sitemap script (see signature).

even witha sitemap, a new forum is going to take some time to get some momentum going, but you'll definately get there once things start getting indexed.

as for the settings, you'll want to keep all of those on, they're stopping bots from registering; by disabling them you're welcoming bots and trolls in.

Okay when or if you do it is really fairly simple . There are like two settings in the script. That you may need to play with.
One is the old url path and the other is how the redirect handles it. The latter is the one that may need some experimentation with.

Great stuff, guys. Thanks, again.

Gizmo,

I have no doubt that your services would be quality. But with all due respect I'm going to hold off on considering them. I've recently 'dumped' a good bit on to our site's owner and presently i'm not anxious to anything else of him.

I'd prefer to first explore any and all procedures which i can do on my own.

thanks again

Is there any literature out there on how to perform any and all of these tasks? Some kind of "Increase number of Google Hits" for Dummies guide? Have these issues already been addressed in another thread? Might there be some guide i could view before I resort to asking you guys 2 million technical questions?





Are the UBB scripts and 'redirects' unique? Or are they pretty much standard and not specialized to UBB? Where can i read about this? Show me, please. Thanks


Show me, please. Thanks

When you upgraded you were required to use the importer. In that zip file were replacement files for classic for redirects.
ultimatebb.cgi I believe is the name of one.
This would have been placed in the old directory for classic to replace the original file.
In that file was a couple of values to set using a text editor.
Some may need some trial and error.

In a nutshell if a user or spider has bookmarked your old urls and tries to visit the old classic url it will redirect them to the new urls used by threads.

Thanks again, Ruben.

Before i go on let me say that an internet professional told my associate that our UBB software could NOT be updated -- it was NOT possible. So with 6.2 and a memebership que filled with thousands of people wanting to sell a Britany Spear Sex Tape i was certain that our forum was headed to the toilet.

Since then i found someone who collaborated with the forementioned professional, proposed 'work around' solutions for the 'deal breaker' problems and got our software updated.

I was prepared to shell out some of my own $$$ and ask others do the same. But my associate told me that was not necessary after seeing the discounted price we were given.

So I need to say that I am absolutely delighted with the fellow who upgraded our software -- regardless of whether he did redirect srcipts or whatever. I don't wish to imply that i'm anything but grateful towards him.

Great tips are shared here but with the new Google wouldn't all this will take twice as long? the site/forum will be doing the google dance for a while. they're just making it a more difficult for the regular guy/gal to get their site index and bring organic traffic in.

there's always something