Professionalizing your forum, part two

Since I wrote my first post about professionalizing your forum, I realized there are some other actions that will up your game in this area.

Monitor your domain for blacklisting

Blacklisting happens when users report to one or more blacklist sites that your site is sending out spam or contains malware. Generally you don’t get put on a blacklist inadvertently, so your site may have been hacked. It’s also possible that some email sent or reportedly sent from your domain were judged as spam or spam-like. It’s also possible of course that someone is falsely reporting your site to a blacklist. In any event being on a blacklist is not a mark of distinction. You need to monitor blacklists and take corrective action if your domain shows up on a list. Being on a blacklist can get your dropped from search engines or move way down in the rankings, as well as dramatically reduce site traffic.

Since you probably don’t want to check all the blacklists out there individually, there are services out there that can help you. If you have just one domain and getting one email a week is sufficient, you can use this site for free. They offer paid plans for multiple domains and more frequent checks, and there are other similar services so shop around.

To get yourself off a blacklist usually requires some explicit action on your part where you appeal or prove that the content does not or no longer exists.

Monitor, find and fix issues with Google Webmaster Tools

Google of course is constantly searching the web and indexing as much content on your site as you allow it to index. Google Webmaster Tools can find security issues with your site too, as well as tell you of issues like links that are bad that should be fixed.

To see reports about your domain you must take the time to register the site with Google, which can be done using a number of methods. Google will tell you if there are any critical issues but to do things like fix broken links you have to dig into their reports. Since most links on your site are going to be in posts posted by users to your forum, fixing these links is probably not worth the effort. However, there may be other links that are worth fixing.

Periodically check your WOT Rating

Browsers generally support a Web of Trust (WOT) extension. The extension allows users to easily say whether they trust your site or not. Since it’s an extension, you can install it in your favorite browser and when you are on your site monitor your reported trust status. If you notice your site trust level going down, you might want to see if there is a root cause and take appropriate actions.

There is some controversy about whether WOT can itself be trusted, since it was reported its developers were collecting your browser history without identifying information.

Use a sitemap

A sitemap indexes your forum’s content into a file that search engines like Google can read. It’s an authoritative way of describing the content on your site to search engines. There is a sitemap extension that works for phpBB 3.1 and reputedly 3.2 as well. Since it is simple to install, installing this one should be a no-brainer, providing you know about it!

Moderate, or take out the trash

A lot of administrators don’t even read their forums, or not all parts of it. It could be because the forum gets a lot of traffic and it’s a lot to keep up on. All forums should at least be moderated, either by an administrator or one or more global or forum-specific moderators. The moderation tools in phpBB are pretty good. They let users do a lot of the moderation for you by at least being able to report a post as inappropriate, spam or whatever. They won’t do this though unless you encourage them, so if this is important to you post a global announcement to this effect.

Disk space is cheap these days so moderation may seem like a lot of work. Why not just let people post whatever they want in whatever rambling way they want? For many forums this is fine, but for certain forums it’s not appropriate. You want the content to be relevant and that can be done by removing posts and topics that aren’t relevant.

Posts that seek to troll other users, inflame conversations and such are rarely desired. Here’s where you moderators can be of help, perhaps by empowering them to set up moderation guidelines for their forums setting the rules and then letting them wield the power. Hopefully this will translate into a better reputation for your forum and topics as search engines decide the content is more relevant.

As long as your moderation rules are clear, a well moderated forum where irrelevant stuff is regularly pruned is a good idea. It’s unlikely your readers want to read irrelevant content anyhow.

You might want to set up an off-topic forum for general banter, so your main forums can stay clean. Moderators may choose to move these topics into such a forum rather than remove them.

Consider pruning

phpBB has a rarely used pruning feature. It lets administrators throw out old content. This is rarely used for obvious reasons: old content is not necessarily irrelevant and it’s unlikely that you will hit some sort of quota for the size of your database. It’s possible that search engines will rank you higher if the old stuff is regularly pruned. Global pruning is an administrator responsibility. Topics can be pruned on various common sense criteria: days since there was a posting and days since someone last viewed the topic. You can prune announcements, stickies and old polls as part of pruning or not. To prune: ACP > Forums > Manage forums > Prune forums.

There is likely more to this topic that may generate future posts.

 

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