Why has this forum declined in recent months?

R

Red_Army

Active member
In 2004, this forum averaged 20-100 online users at a time. Now only a handful of users are online, maybe 2-10 the most. What has lead to this decline?
 
I can only speculate, but I think that since many of the users are either on Active Duty or Reserves, they've got priorities and they don't include being on the forum. Others have just abandoned the forum altogether for various reasons.

As well, many people have been banned (whether it be permanent or temporary) for various reasons.

Like I said, I can only speculate but these might be some of the reasons for the decline.
 
The explanation for that is pretty simple (and HIGHLY annoying)... :?

A couple of months ago I installed a script that was supposed to count the number of times Search engine spiders/robots visited the forum pr day, and how many pages they crawled..

The script seemed to work fine, and there were hundreds to thousands of visits by them every day.
But the next couple of weeks google seemed to "loose" more and more of the indexed forum pages, and the number of daily visitors and registrations started to drop.
It went so far that all of the forum pages and even the index page of the forum disappeared from the Google index, and I could not understand why.
Everything seemed to work fine, and the script still counted many hundreds of spider visits every day..

But in the beginning of this month I discovered by "accident" what had happened..
There was a major bug in the script, that made ALL pages look like this:
phpBB : Critical Error

Could not get theme data for themes_id [1]
Click to expand...
When SE spiders/bots visited the forum..
Every single page looked exactly the same, so they were kicked out of Yahoo/MSN/Google etc.. because of that.
But I fixed this a couple of weeks ago, and all of the search engines are spidering and indexing the forum pages like they should now.
Google is up to 9500 indexed pages, from 350, but it's still a way to go to it reaches 25,000+ again, like it was before the bug.

The number of daily visitors and registrations have gone up the last week, and I expect it to rise every week (day) from now on...

The forum is again climbing to the #1 spot in google for the search term "Military Forums" (#3 now)..
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=military+forums&meta=


:evil:
 
Locke said:
what can we the members do to help boost the ranking?
Click to expand...

Links, links and more links..

Code: 
[url="http//www.military-quotes.com/forum/"]Military Forums[/url]

:D
 
It jumps up and down a bit, depending on which datacenter Google decides to show you..

It looks like it's going a bit better now, I saw up to 32 visitors online at once yesterday, and we get several new members every day again now.. :)
 
I see it as #3 and #4 now..
And we even had 40 visitors online at once yesterday, so things are getting better every day.. :)
 
I think thats very unlikely cos he was discussing very actively before he left, I think he prolly got busy with life (wife? :lol:) or he went back home to China and doesn't have internet access anymore
 
If he was to go back to China. he sure does have internet Access. On his signature, he provides a link which he usually post pics on a weekly basis. But I doubt he will be able to have access to this site over there because of the Government Firewall.
 
Government Firewall...thats what i meant to say...I think you visited Dalian some days ago?...hows the internet access there? ...what sites are allowed and what not
 
There was a change in the plan on my trip to Asia. Originally I supposed to go to Dalian but unfortunetly there have been a schedule change in flight plans to India which made my stay in China shorter than usual.


But while in China, I'll see about their Government Firewall to discover whether this site is blocked or not.

So it comes to this, I will be visiting Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, and Bangalore.



FYI: During my short time in Shanghai about 3 years ago, I was able to access www.cnn.com , www.bbc.com , and mostly official western news sources. I was able to gain access to German sites...not a problem. But I tried out several extremists factions Websites and turns out many of them were blocked.

Yes there is a government controlled Firewall but not to an extent in which most people say. All I can say is this, the Chinese Government Censorship Firewall acts a lot like a Forum Moderator. Surprisingly, they are beginning to tolerate critisms and opinions, but certainly not inflammatory messages or anything like it. So which means that www.military-quotes.com/forum/ probably won't be blocked in China.
 
I don't think it's blocked in China, since I several of our members have Chinese IPs..
 
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