Necro Posts

[Azareal]

What do you think of necro posting? In other words, reviving threads which no one's posted in for a long time.
I don't mind it too much, although it can be slightly annoying, if someone's just reviving a mountain of threads and their posts just wind up being +1s or me toos.

 

[Martee]

If they are adding value to an older thread (IE, updating information or similar), I'm all for it. Add away and keep me updated. I've seen it on SEO threads for example, updated based on algorithm changes and so on.

If, as you say, they are just blasting +1's and bumps then that's a no-no. Adds no value to anything and that's truly annoying for me!

 

[Scarlharp]

I'm fine with it as long as it's not a pointless bump (what haze said basically then)

Better than having duplicate threads everywhere

 

[Bryn]

It used to be frowned upon back years ago but now, people are more tolerant with it. But bumping old news threads is still a big no-no though, unless it's something that can make it become "latest news" again.

 

[Azareal]

It used to be frowned upon back years ago but now, people are more tolerant with it. But bumping old news threads is still a big no-no though, unless it's something that can make it become "latest news" again.

One problem with it is when you bump a long thread with outdated information or opinions, and then, these opinions are the first things people see. I see this on some admin sites from time to time, particularly with SEO advice.

I cannot tell you the number of times I've seen outdated 2004 advice here on FP and it can be it's own brand of annoying, as people will go out armed with that knowledge and will parrot it all over the place lol

A few myths:

Meta keywords matter - Google doesn't care.

PHP is fast and efficient - It's really a snail.

People use SEO URLs just because Google likes it - Google doesn't care, you use SEO URLs because it's professional (a .php or .anything in a URL makes it look dated at best and extremely amateurish at worst) and the names in the URLs give people hints about what they're about to get.

If a company makes a lot of money, it means the people are competent, hence we should take their vague opinions as gospel - I wish, but no.

Linkbacks are important - Yes and no. It isn't really as important in the ways you think, but it can help guide organic users.

vB was good before IB ruined it - I have actually used vB. It was a horrible, horrible software. They hid setting manager navigations under drop-downs, used frames which didn't work on mobile, had permissions for every little thing, had an amateurish looking control panel in contrast to the competition and piled on 30 disjoint features.

Plus, I had mods just casually finding security vulnerabilities in the thing.

I remember MyBB's control panel actually looking quite reasonable at the time compared to the frame infested one. Many of the problems people now see in hindsight and chalk up to "it was normal for the time" were things I was pretty annoyed about.

I can go on but there are quite a few myths I see on admin sites.

 

[Jordan]

People use SEO URLs just because Google likes it - Google doesn't care, you use SEO URLs because it's professional (a .php or .anything in a URL makes it look dated at best and extremely amateurish at worst) and the names in the URLs give people hints about what they're about to get.

😵 SEO URL's is still important and still is a minor ranking factor in 2018.
It also helps improve your site's visibility on search engines.

If you created two of the exact same pages of the exact same content for A/B testing
One with
domain.tld/?pid=11
vs
domain.tld/article/why-seo-is-important

Which one do you think will show up more on Google?

What is not okay, and is irrelevant is placing useless keywords in your URL.

This is just one of many reasons why SEO URL's are important.

The extension of the URL is irrelevant (.html, .php, etc) and has nothing to do with SEO URL's.

Meta tags matter - Google doesn't care.

Although not used to rank much anymore, meta tags are still really important. In fact, Google still uses them all the time!

Yes, Google still does use the meta description quite frequently. I know it seems like sometimes they don't. But, in fact, there's a high percent of the time when the actual meta description from the page is used.

https://moz.com/blog/rank-in-2018-seo-checklist
https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

That was a little off topic, so to answer the OP
What @Martin said

 

[Jerlene]

As a forum owner I always thought that as long as value is being added to the thread then I'm alright with it. It depends though. If it's a marketplace ad that they're digging up the OP is probably no longer looking so I got excited for nothing.

 

[Azareal]

😵 SEO URL's is still important and still is a minor ranking factor in 2018.
It also helps improve your site's visibility on search engines.

If you created two of the exact same pages of the exact same content for A/B testing
One with
domain.tld/?pid=11
vs
domain.tld/article/why-seo-is-important

Which one do you think will show up more on Google?

What is not okay, and is irrelevant is placing useless keywords in your URL.

This is just one of many reasons why SEO URL's are important.

The extension of the URL is irrelevant (.html, .php, etc) and has nothing to do with SEO URL's.

Although not used to rank much anymore, meta tags are still really important. In fact, Google still uses them all the time!

https://moz.com/blog/rank-in-2018-seo-checklist
https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

That was a little off topic, so to answer the OP
What @Martin said

The ones who said that were Google. They completely ignore meta tags because they were really heavily abused and they don't give any URLs any particular treatment.

 

[Jordan]

They completely ignore meta tags because they were really heavily abused

Yes, meta tags are no longer used as ranking tool. (More geared towards the "keywords" meta) But they still use meta tags, especially for SERPs. So not filling out your meta descriptions and such is a terrible idea.

 

[Azareal]

Yes, meta tags are no longer used as ranking tool. (More geared towards the "keywords" meta) But they still use meta tags, especially for SERPs. So not filling out your meta descriptions and such is a terrible idea.

Yes, meta keywords, those things. I probably worded that stupidly lol

 

[Bryn]

Meta tags matter - Google doesn't care.

Yep. I knew of that before

 

[Azareal]

Yep. I knew of that before

Updated it, that was slightly embarrassing.
And you will be surprised how often I see people harping on how you should have meta keywords.

 

[Scarlharp]

>PHP is a snail

7.0 isn't too bad. Just idiot inefficient coders are the problem like every other language out there, using it for the wrong things.

 

[Reverie]

I personally have never minded necro posting - as long as it is adding value to the topic. I prefer necro posting rather than creating the same topic 10 million times. However I don't expect members to search for a topic - so I understand either way.

 

[Azareal]

>PHP is a snail

7.0 isn't too bad. Just idiot inefficient coders are the problem like every other language out there, using it for the wrong things.

It's certainly faster than PHP5, although it still has problems.

The biggest problem is that it's stateless. Every-time a request is made, the PHP interpreter loads the script (there's some optimisation around this in PHP7 to try to grease the wheels), loads all the data from the database / cache, initialises all the data-structures, and then, it finally spits out a response, only to throw all that work away and do it all over for each and every time a request comes in from the browser.

Other ecosystems tend to just hold all of the common data (e.g. settings, forums, groups, etc.) in memory, as-well as the data-structures to avoid doing anywhere near as much unnecessary work.

The other problem with stateless systems is timed events. MyBB works around this by having a hidden image on every page, so that when you load the page, not just one but two requests are made and in each and every one of those second requests, MyBB will consult the database to see if there are any tasks which need to be run.

It can theoretically be solved by setting up a cron tab or systemd timers, but this is extra work and no one wants to do work, plus no one could imagine that MyBB would even do such a thing.

Also, if you're not using PHP, then you can avoid having ten queries per page for analytics or statistics (forums have a great love for things like view counters) and just have the software fire off aggregated queries once every fifteen minutes.

You are right though by saying that there are probably a lot of horribly inefficient coders lol

 

[Jason76]

If the original poster is not around, I'd say close the old thread. Anyway, if a bunch of the old posters are not around, should that be closed? What the original poster is around but not the other ones?