RPGWW

Well, it's been over a year since we moved over, and despite the comments in ezBoard's FAQ, the old board's still up and fine. And even further, it still ranks above both this board and the main rpgww.org site on Google for the RPGWW term (despite the fact that as I understand the algorithm, having a term in your domain name is supposed to maximize your PageRank for that term). So, does anyone have a good reason why I shouldn't go ahead and clear out the old forum, to move the purge process along or at the very least kill its PR?

There are a number of suggestions they give for hastening the purge process, and who knows how effective they actually are, but in terms of popularity doing this could only help this board. Duplicate content definitely does penalize PR on Google (as well as other search engines, so far as I know); though I'm not sure to what degree that applies beyond a full HTML code duplication, it certainly wouldn't be helping this forum to keep it up. It's not necessary as a backup as I've been keeping near-monthly forum backups since the move. And after a year I think we'll have had all the returning members we can assume to get; even if we haven't, this forum is still the third result for RPGWW, under the site itself and the old board.

So, are there any reasons I haven't thought of personally for not wiping the old forum and hopefully letting ezBoard finish the job once they get around to it?

I don't see any problems, personally.

Well, why couldn't we just destroy the old board, and then like, move the cache of it over to the rpgww wiki so that if anyone was feeling nostalgic, they could still look at it?

If it's not doing us any good now, and keeping it is a detriment... do as you will, Sir Idran.

Smash it to bits!

Molokidan wrote:Well, why couldn't we just destroy the old board, and then like, move the cache of it over to the rpgww wiki so that if anyone was feeling nostalgic, they could still look at it?

Storing a cache of the entire forum would likely be infeasible, but I could make a copy of the forum main page and maybe the subforums to keep on the site. As for the contents, they were already all moved over to this forum when we migrated anyway, so we wouldn't be losing any actual data if we got rid of it.

Oh, well then yeah, let's definitely give it the death sentence.

What other folks said.

Once the old board is gone, there will be no more chance of anyone finding us by using ezBoard's search function.

I'm not against deleting the old board though. I don't know if the chances of anyone else finding us that way are worth the decrease in PR, though that happens to be the way I originally found this community. So, basically, I'm fine either way.

If finding us using ezb's search is a big concern, we can have it purged and re-register it later, with more "GO HERE INSTEAD" stuff all over it.

I don't see why keeping it around is a problem at all. From what I've noticed, not everything got transferred correctly, if at all, and I fail to see how "Oh no it ranks above the main site on google" is truely a problem.

Oh shit you have to aim a little lower if you need to google us goddamn.

Which stuff didn't get transferred correctly? While the board's still around, I can try to re-grab anything that didn't. But as far as I know, every thread that was still existent on the old board was pulled over in at least some form to this forum.

But either way, this would only be hastening the process, since any inactive boards are supposed to be regularly purged by ezBoard as it is. I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already happened, to be honest.

And I'm not just talking about preexisting members using Google to search the forum or something, I'm talking about the fact that the old board consistently shows up in any search terms that bring up this forum, and usually at a higher rank assumedly because it was first. Of course old members can just scroll until they find the current forum, but what about new members? From a UI perspective, the more links there are from the "surface" of a web page to a goal, the less likely a user is to bother navigating to the goal. Thus, just because the old board has that big link that says "click here for the current forum" is no guarantee that potential new members are likely to click it. It's a simple fact that people are lazy when it comes to navigating sites on the internet, technically adept or not, intelligent or not, well-suited for the forum or not.

I don't recall anything not transferring correctly, but the backup data from the EZFluke didn't come back right if that's what you're thinking of--posts were restored out of order. It was craziness.

CLEANSE, PURGE, KILL

Don't see any reason to keep the Ezboard around and, if new people are trying to find it then killing would avoid confusion.