My brand new site...

and my first attempt at a forum

Please take a look at www.nursing-nlp.org and tell me what you think

 

c'mon guys... give me some feedback... I can take it

 

ulp... pornographic spammers? Anyone else had this problem? I note that phpbb has a bad word filter... will that help? What stops it happening here?

 

you need to post more messages on your froum to atract users. someone even suggested that you can use different usernames

 

Thanks Shannon... positive feedback is great<g>... I'm learning that less is more in many aspects of web design... wrt the use of phpbb... I did look at invision, but at least with phpbb there is a history of support and hacks from a community... others have had these problems before (and this is one area important enough to me to spend some moderator time on it.... if I have to, I'll simply approve each applicant after x number of posts. It's a fairly niche market, so I don't expect that approach to kill my time

 

ok... I can see the point. I may have to do a good spread of posts in each of the forum categories to get some response (number of posts 0 does not look good. I'm not up for registering as different people though... deceipt doesn't sit well with me

 

PHPBB has a problem in that there's software out there that can register for the forum, and assign a pornographic URL against the profile. Usually the member name is something unusual.

The best way to get around it is to authorise all members, a pain, but it's an even bigger pain if you get spammed by these b*stards.

 

Looks good but you haven't put in the mod to removed the session id's for guests ... this means googlebot won't index the site.

For help and advice getting a new forum off the ground I strongly recommend www.theforumzone.com --- lots of helpful folks there to assist in getting a new forum site off the ground.

GL.

 

OK... I give up... where can I find this mod? I can find one that removes the session ID for googlebot and inktomi, but not one for guests.

Thanks for that... on my way

 

Another question relevant to my www.nursing-nlp.org site. Why is the adsense on the page showing up for PHP and bulletin boards, and what can I do to change that? If you look at a post, the adsense shows up for NLP and such like which is what I would want.

 

You must keep a copyright for phpbb in the footer but it is this copyright throwing off the adsense content algo.

Replace your footer: "Powered by phpBB 2.0.10 © 2001, 2002 phpBB Group"

with a .gif and make the alt value on the <img> tag "Nursing and NLP" ... magically your adsense will display content appropriate ads much better. What I mean is take a screenshot and crop out that copyright line and then it is one of the files (probably overall_footer.php?) you will replace the text version of the copyright with your image version. If memory serves, you do not have to keep it as an href to be in compliance with their TOS... just displaying the image will be good enough.

Sorry - I haven't answered your previous Q on getting rid of the session id for guests ... I don't have the info handy... on theforumzone you should get a quick and informative answer .. if you don't then post back here and i'll look for the information... I've switched over to vBulletin for most of my stuff and so am not as up to speed on phpbb as I once was.

 

Worked a treat (I tweaked some other stuff for safety sake, but worked a treat) FYI, you need to keep the href... it's written in as a comment in the html.

Interestingly, it hasn't propogated to the other pages, but they don't yet have posts on them... I'll wait and see what happens

 

Bizarre... now it's stopped working again

 

With respect to the forum, I don't know if this of any help, Trance, but how about heavily promoting your site alone, then running an email newsletter subscription on the site until you get a certain number of subscribers, say a 500-1000 or so. In the meantime you can build up a list of 'taster' articles for each section of the forum and 'prime' it with subjects, threads etc. Then, when it's ready, invite everyone to take part...

Just a thought, I'm sure Shawn did something similar... ?

 

Thanks Lever... problem is, I've now declared myself live, so I think I will just have to pursue members slowly ... wish I had thought of that approach earlier

 

Ah, in that case, Trance, you can say your site's in the BETA stage, soft rollout, whatever...