New Forum Features

[Craig]

New Forum Features

I've just added some more upgrades to the board to increase search engine readability and integrate some of the new social bookmarking options. Here's a brief rundown on what has been added:

Linkbacks – The best way to explain this is to simply provide you with the link to the explanation given via the software developers. Click Here for an explanation.

The New Icons – You are probably now seeing the 4 new icons within the posts in the forum. These are links to submit a post or thread to Digg, Del.ici.ous, Technorati, and Furl. These are sites that people submit articles, blog posts, and now forum posts/threads to if they like the content. It provides a new avenue for someone to view the content. If people like the content, they will often vote for it. The more votes an article receives, the higher is moves up rankings at these individual sites. Digg is the most popular of these. Getting enough votes or “diggs” to move you to the front page of digg.com can virtually guarantee you that thousands will view the content in a short period of time. Tehnorati works a little different, as Technorati searches for content on its own, must like a search engine does. Clicking on the Technorati link will simply take you to where technorati has the post published, providing it has been indexed.

What does this mean for this you and this website?
On many occasions, a member will put much thought and time into a post, providing the other members of the forum with some very valuable content, and/or an avenue for the beginning of a very informative and active thread. For the author of the content, it provides and avenue for people to view your work. For the Fencing.Net, it provides and avenue for new viewers to see the content available here, and entice more members to join.

What is the ultimate goal?
Getting your content viewed by an increased amount of people makes your efforts that much more valuable. Having them see your work at this site brings quality traffic to this forum, and will ultimately increase the amount of quality visitors and members who view this site on a daily basis. More people discussing the actual topics you come here to participate in results in a better experience for all of us within this forum.

Feel free to ask any questions, and I will do my best to answer them. All of this is fairly new for me as well, but if I don’t have the answer, I can most likely get it for you.

[noodle]

how do the linkbacks apply to forum posts? like, how are they inserted?
also, why not reddit in the social bookmarks?

[Craig]

how do the linkbacks apply to forum posts? like, how are they inserted?
also, why not reddit in the social bookmarks?

I'll see about adding reddit in the future (once I've seen how these work), but those are the big 4 right now for social bookmarking.

In terms of linking back - the linkback tool provides the thread URL for you to link to the thread if you're referencing it from your blog or another site/forum.

Craig

[noodle]

allow me to clarify my question

with most blogging software, if there's a recieved trackback message, you can set it up to post a return link in the comments of a post. in the case of a f.net post or blog entry, will this happen in some form? or does this just shoot out linkbacks, not recieve them or create some sort of representation?

[Craig]

It would be at the bottom of the thread posting.

Craig

[eac]

Second the request for reddit submission. That said, it seems not incredibly likely that a given post on fencing.net would interest the reddit/digg/whateverthehellelsethereis communities.

[noodle]

if it interests ya, craiggers, i reserved the fencing section in newsvine a long time ago with intent to use it, but never got a chance.