posted 06-01-2017 11:52 AM            

Your Google search results will vary depending on what Google knows about you. Here is an example showing 41,400 results of which only 8,670 are actually directly SSF results.

The numbers of visitors to the SSF remains consistently high. Participation (posts) is the lowest ever.

Managing any WEB site such that the content scrapers are defeated is as big a job as keeping the bad guys away. In fact, managing the content scrapers is a bigger job.

The SSF, even with the donation button, hasn't covered one month of operational costs. We greatly appreciate those you who have contributed.

What to do?

Over the next few weeks I will be pondering this. I will have to consider the sorts of things that don't add significant overhead cost or time.

Right now the fastest and easiest thing to do is make some or all of the forums require 'All Access Permissions membership' to even look into a particular forum. For example: to see the posts/threads in the General Forum, members would have to enter their id/password (once per session). I suspect we would leave the New Members' Forums as they are.

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posted 06-02-2017 10:27 AM            

Since my little project is hosted by Rootsweb, I have no idea or control over what is crawling around in my posted data. I can say that the primary referrer by far is Ecommerce; SMP doesn't make it in the top 10, I am sorry to say. I did a new build a few days ago and was pondering, while uploading around 300 new pages, why I bother. I certainly make no money from it, though I suspect others do, and I can't remember the last time I got a comment or query. Looking at the user logs, it seems to be of little interest institutionally or academically, which is no great surprise these days. If it was not for the pleasure of teasing out the occasional mystery I come across in my rambles, I think I would declare it done.