A modest proposal to "save" the board - a new, cleaner BBS board

[Aussie]

("hey" being southern for "Howdy")
Way back when, I went to Sydney University with an American girl who said "Hey!" in greeting all the time, but she was from Illinois via California before she got to Sydney. (She reckoned they told 'em to "Go West, Young Man".....all the Californian young men drowned.). Well, it was Southern Illinois.

"Really, really serious about getting new blood"
Wonder if the blood bank would cash an artery?

I agree re the Yuku interface, any suckier and Vax and Hoover are outa business.

[I D Shukhov]

I thought you might be becoming less dangerous Dino!

[Aussie]

"One fist of iron, the other one's steel,
If the right one doesn't get ya, the left one will"

[Origisaurus]

I thought you might be becoming less dangerous Dino!

Not to worry - same old nasty as always! 

[Richardk]

But I agree that it sounds like a lot of work.

[The Gorn]

Basically, it's just moving everyone over to a new board with the same handles. But then I gotta have a way to extract all the current usernames, to create passwords for each one, and then to perhaps automate the delivery of those passwords on the new board to people's Yuku in boxes by using a script.

The alternative is to go on the honor system and let people pick out whatever handle they want.

Yes, maybe I should just do that. The "big technical project" element of this is what has stalled me every time.

[PhilFromNY]

The honor system sounds best. Anyone who has their handle taken can always message you through this board.

[The Gorn]

The honor system sounds best. Anyone who has their handle taken can always message you through this board.

Bingo! Right. I didn't think of that. Thanks.

[The Gorn]

I think I mentioned this in another thread - when I google the URL of this board, using the string site:openitforum.yuku.com, I get a walloping 28 - that's 4 times 7 - hits on Google. The digits were enlarged for the sake of outrage.  

We have something like 38,000 (38 thousand) individual posted messages on this board.  I cannot BELIEVE that Google just decided that this many messages were pure spam or otherwise not worthy of indexing.

And also, I had the domain that this new board is under pointing at our Yuku board. I got similar results when looking for the URL by our domain.

I suspect that just being on Yuku had everything to do with this lousy coverage. I am thinking that it is a combination of two things: the low quality of Yuku user content in general, and possibly some throttling of search engine spidering by Yuku.

Folks, we have been sitting on a ton of fantastic link-bait for the last 8 years. It's high time to make use of that to attract some new blood.

Placing this content under a custom domain, and ESPECIALLY pulling it out of the walled garden of our old community host, is, as I see it, essential to our survival as a forum community.