It’s spring time in the United States. Flowers are a’blooming and SEO’s are stirring about the discussion forums and pollinating threads. Forums rock, but one annoyance I have is the same topics seem to get posted over and over. This is due to the way forum software is designed–threads asking/answering the same question descend into the nether regions of unbumped posts and eventually get buried.

As sure as the seasons, every SEO knows that Google updates toolbar PageRank and backlinks about 4 times each year. It’s quite comical to observe how one person, usually a newbie, posts a new thread in the webmaster forums announcing that he is not sure, but he may have discovered a Google update is underway. Lurkers chime in, questioning, rebutting, ridiculing in prosaic banter until finally everyone agrees that a Google update has occurred. Then, there remains only one thing to be said.

“Google is updating.”

“I’m seeing changes.”

 ”Me too!”

“I don’t see anything. Wait, now I do.”

“When is the next update?”

The inevitable “Google is updating forum thread” became such an annoyance at SitePoint that the Google Forum moderator posted a sticky thread explaining the frequency of Google PR updates and warning members not to “start any new threads asking about when the next update will occur.” I checked a few forums and quickly picked out the Google update threads. Like the seasons, I doubt that this ritual will ever change.

contact or mail or email or phone or fax or tel site www.forumpoint.com

It looks as if someone has a massive database of domain names for which they are performing automated queries on search engines to mine contact information. I would imagine that this type of data could have value since it would be more reliable–at least for marketing purposes–than the oft spamed whois record data. Once this info is mined from thousands of sites, what will be done with it? Dump it on a scraper site? Organize it in an AdSense laden yellow pages directory? Sell it? This is not a very comforting discovery and probably a good reason for the paranoid to hide data intended only for site visitors. A text image or JavaScript should do the trick.

To install a forum or any script, you normally have to upload the script files to your server, setup a database connection, then follow a series of steps to install (often done via your browser). If you have a web host that offers a cPanel control panel feature, you may be able to install phpBB2 or SMF forums via the Fantastico feature, which eliminates many of the hassles of installation. vBulletin seems to be by far the most popular forum software available.

Installing a forum software script is the easy part. The biggest challenge of forum owners–at least the most time consuming–is keeping regular communication with the forum users who post questions in threads. Moderating a forum can take a great deal of time and commitment.