2020-09-13, 09:39 PM
(2020-09-13, 09:30 PM)Kauri Wrote:(2020-09-13, 09:11 PM)netllama Wrote:(2020-09-13, 09:08 PM)Kauri Wrote: Agreed, that was an incredibly fast forum set-up, thank you Netllama!!!
One idea/question: Is there any way to help folks who might be googling something along the lines of "what happened to the death-valley.net forum" find this new forum? Just thinking of old forum members who don't know what's happened in the last 36 hours (wow, did all this really happen so fast??).
I'm open to suggestions. Unfortunately, I've already been locked out of the old site as a result of scraping all 232MB of posts so I can't even post there any more.
I was initially thinking an idea might be to add something to your updates page (https://netllama.linux-sxs.org/dv/index.html) along the lines of "if you're looking for the old death-valley.net forum..." or something that folks who are looking for the old forum would be likely to google. Problem is, whenever I google "death-valley.net" I get lots of results from the old forum. I'm not sure if at some point those results will disappear and this one will appear near the top (I have no idea how often the google bot visits sites, or even if that's what happens). I'll keep thinking. For now I'm just emailing this forum link to any of the members from the old forum who I have email addresses for.
I did update my page pointing to the new site a little while ago. But since the old forum is now effectively shut down, anyone who isn't already aware of the replacement forum is going to have a hard time finding it, at least in the short term. I did post messages on Panamint Valley & DVTalk forums to let people know what's going on.
Google's bot is fairly aggressive. I generally see it updating on web properrties that I run every 24 hours. Its quite likely that it will detect the loss of the old forum by this time tomorrow (Sept 14), after which all the content will no longer be indexed on Google.
Hopefully we can get people over here and keep things alive.
Speaking of which, I'm going to start a new thread here with more details on the (full!) data scrape that I completed of the old forum.