Couple of suggestions

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x
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Couple of suggestions

Post by x »

Hi,
Just a couple of suggestions that may help to attract more members.

1. I noticed on google searches for 'anime cel forum' etc., an entry for Anime Beta does show up but there is no accompanying description of the site due to the robots.txt exclusion settings. I think if the site had a description people would be less inclined to just skip over the entry.

2. As this site is invite only, I think it might help to have a prominent post somewhere with instructions for how someone can apply for membership. I realise that these details are in the 'Registration in AnimeBeta v9.1 and up' post but it might help to have a separate post with the subject 'How to apply for membership' or similar.

Just my 2 cents.
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JWR
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by JWR »

I moved that post "'Registration in AnimeBeta v9.1" from the "Please Read" section to mark it as a Global announcement so it will show at the top of each section visited.

As far as the Google listing. I am not sure how that gets updated. I know certain things were done when Beta was hit with several spam attacks and if that affected that listing.
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Rekka Alexiel
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by Rekka Alexiel »

There should be a way to submit the page to Google for it to appear higher in search results, but there's a lot involved with this. Let me play around with my other message board and see if I can figure out how it can be done. The second problem is that it's unlikely for this to be changed/updated until Beta is moved over to my site so I can get my hands on the necessary files to do it. :3
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by x »

Hi Rekka,
The message that Google is showing for the Anime Beta entry is as follows:-
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more

The robots.txt file is usually used to provide instructions to web crawlers (robots) on what they are allowed to see for the site.
In this case it appears that there must be some 'disallows' set up so that the Google crawler can't access any of the forum pages and is therefore unable to create a description of the site as it cannot scan the site for info.

The robots.txt file would normally be found in the top level directory of the web server (ie. where index.html would be for a web page)

Note: There could be a legitimate reason for having the robots.txt file set up like this. However, it should be noted that 'bad' robots/crawlers (eg. malware robots searching for vulnerabilities or email address harvesters for spammers) would ignore the robots.txt file and access the site anyway.

However as indicated, it looks like this is hosted by someone else so you may not be able to access and update this file currently.
My apologies for rambling on if you are already aware of all of this but if not then I hope this helps a bit.
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nowherekid85
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by nowherekid85 »

x wrote: 1. I noticed on google searches for 'anime cel forum' etc., an entry for Anime Beta does show up but there is no accompanying description of the site due to the robots.txt exclusion settings. I think if the site had a description people would be less inclined to just skip over the entry.
This. I think the lack of a description is a big problem. If I do a search for something, I'm probably going to ignore the link when all it says is "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."

But to be honest, I don't really think forums are that popular in general or as widely used any more, given all the other types of social media that are so popular these days.
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by x »

nowherekid85 wrote: But to be honest, I don't really think forums are that popular in general or as widely used any more, given all the other types of social media that are so popular these days.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Though I think that a forum is still one of the better ways to store and share information for this.

I think the cel and sketch contests are excellent ways to gather some awareness.

I guess at the end of the day animation art collection is quite a niche hobby particularly with the phasing out of cel-based animation.
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xiaolungbao
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Re: Couple of suggestions

Post by xiaolungbao »

Hi. I am new and I found this site randomly, but anime-beta was not a top hit when searching. I found it but animanga was the top hit. For anime-beta this message appears, 'We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.' As someone new that is unhelpful and a description is needed. Don't know how to do it. Just figured someone should know.
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