Well, we've still been having some problems lately with the site going down due to unwanted guests. I've instituted a few new things that will definitely help with this, all of which you shouldn't even notice since you're all members.

1.) The forums are no longer accessible to guest users. We know this will upset our guests and the casual lurker, but that's more incentive to join, right?

2.) Some areas are now locked down to members only, such as the advanced search and user directory. Guests can still use the simple search, however.

I hated to do these things, but what's the point of having a site that no one can get to?

-Dain

Some other forum sites are partially locked down, like guests can see topic titles but not any content or only the first post. The forum is such a huge part of the site that at least some of it should be searchable. It may be too much load, but make an exception for google/yahoo/etc to let their indexers through?

Locking down advanced database sounds good.

The problem is that we can either exclude all bots or selectively exclude specific bots. There's no way AFAIK to say, "just let google and yahoo in, but none of the rest". This is useless because there are hundreds of crawler bots. I'm always open for any ideas if anyone out there has web server experience with this.

The other problem with Googlebot is that I instructed it to index 1 page every 5 seconds... it's not honoring my directives, and is opening 100+ channels at once.

Put a topic list somewhere in a public area? Will something like google capture an rss and use that for searches?

I was wondering why I had to sign it to see the forums..

I actually like this new feature..

Should increase the # of members pretty quickly and might encourage people to post instead of lurking.
~~NGD

It's a real shame, I think the best advertisement to grow this site is the possibility of someone searching for something obscure, and our site popping up with high relevance because there's a thread on it or something.

That's how I found other forums and stumbled across the whole community in the first place. Before then I thought forums were just a bunch of 12-year-old trolls looking to cyber. Man, was I disappointed!

Wait, there's 12 year old trolls out there that cyber? crazy.

I'm going to be doing something similar to what bunnyboy mentioned. I'm going to create an area that has all of the game pages cached, and tell Google to comb those pages. Clicking on items within those pages will bring the user to the live site. I think this will work and solve both issues.

Neat...so wait...you're telling me you've got a magic wand, and you're going to wave it around and make it all better!

BEST SYSOP EVER!!!

I must say I haven't had any problems connecting since you had changes a couple of days ago Dain..