SE Forum Visibility (split from Crash on M8 last night...)

[kenny]

The advantage was that the existence of the club could be found by those interested, but content not perused without taking the trouble to sign up. Perhaps an SE1 resurrection is looming by natural forces

Sorry but SE1 (the yahoo group) is a crap format, the threads are hard to follow, a pita to scroll through and impossible to search in the way you can on php. Php isn't perfect but it's not for away from it for the needs of most, plus new add-ons and mods are constantly being developed which will continually improve the format.
I can see why the yahoo group was used but it was outdated years ago and was a miracle it lasted as long as it did.

[campbell]

Er, maybe I wasn't quite clear enough, sorry...that was all kinda tongue in cheek.

But it *does* go some way to explaining how people could expect an online community to operate, in terms of "shelter" from general prying eyes...

Don't get me wrong...I'm happy enough with SE in its present form, nearly 4 years into it

But you also cannot avoid the fact that some items have since been posted into SE1 and the occasional useful (and if needed, more private) blether has ensued. Just worth bearing in mind, that's all.

[Sanjøy]

You do not need to make it a private forum to stop the search engines, robot.txt files are your friend.

[robin]

BTW, SE1 format was an email format - people who wanted to browse online would clearly prefer the PHPBB format to whatever the crap Yahoo offered looked like then.

BUT if you kept the emails in your mail reader, it was more than happy to format in threads and it provides a much better search facility than the PHPBB system does, so it's not fair to say it's crap, it's more fair to say you chose to use a crap way of accessing it

Robinosaurus Rex.

[kenny]

Just my opinion Robin, even reading it from email folders I felt was terrible (for me).