Comments on: Avoid unnecessary barriers

By: Martin Reed

Martin Reed — Thu, 10 May 2007 23:48:37 +0000

Hi Yogesh – thanks for your comment. Yes, changing the forum software was definitely a mistake – thank goodness the community was pretty much dead else the fallout could have been a real problem!

You are right that the URLs to all the posts would be different too – so I also lost any deeplinks from search engine listings (although I setup a .htaccess redirect to the homepage so all was not lost).

Thanks again for your contribution – I hope you are enjoying the blog.

By: Yogesh

Yogesh — Thu, 10 May 2007 23:39:17 +0000

Good to know that you like phpbb so much that you converted a forum running on IPB to phpbb. I also feel changing the forum software to another one confuses people and when they are required to change the password as well, they are bound to get annoyed.

Ps. one more thing you didn’t thought of, while converting the forum you were also converting the URL’s to different ones (unless IPB uses same URL structure). This would have caused some lost traffic from google and other deeplinks posted at forums and sites.

By: Sparking Interest in Online Communities « John Chow dot Com

Sparking Interest in Online Communities « John Chow dot Com — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:01:13 +0000

[...] Avoid unnecessary barriers [...]