Forum Improvements!

[Aedryan Methyus]

Hello All,
I just wanted to let all of you (all ONE OR TWO of you) know that I just finished doing some MAJOR recoding here at the forum and you should notice some significant improvements in its performance. Additionally, we should start seeing a lot of new members soon as well, because these changes made EVERY topic and EVERY post search engine friendly!

This had to be done, because as some of you may know, I recently started noticing that GoogleBot has been spending an excessive amount of time here at the forum and returning way too often. Not only was it using up unnecessary bandwidth and slowing the forum down, but it wasn't indexing any of our forum pages, because of all of our URL's had all kinds of invalid characters in them.

Take a look up at your browser's address bar after you open any of the forums or any of the topics therein. You will notice that there are no longer any ridiculously long URL's with tons of strange characters like, "$%&#=%$#!", etc in any of the URL's (search engine spiders ignore URL's like that!). Instead, whatever the author puts in his/her post's subject field becomes part of that post's URL, which results in a search engine friendly URL!

So, one of the main reasons for letting everyone know about this is, because I would like everyone to start making a conscious effort to put relevant, search engine friendly text in the subject field when they make a post. Proper spelling is very important too! It is also very important to make sure you are putting your posts/topics in a relevant forum. Long story short - When someone on the internet is searching for specific information, the search engine spiders search for the most relevant content to display in their results. If our forum has lots of pages with relevant search terms not only in their URL's, but also in their titles, that makes them significantly more relevant to people's searches. The result.... More visitors and more members for us!

Please be aware that I will be renaming posts, which do not have relevant, search engine friendly text in their subject field from now on. As always, I will also continue moving posts/topics, which were not posted in a relevant forum. I just wanted to let you guys know in case you post something and are unable to find it when you return. If that happens, the easiest way to find your post is to just click on "View Your Posts" at the top of any of the pages.

Thanks,
Aedryan
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