Displaying full text of articles in BB topics?

@beschizza, could boing boing include the author’s name in the abridged article blurby thing on the bbs?

there are definitely some posters that i always read – @maggiek science posts come to mind – and i’m often also drawn to guest bloggers.

I’m getting hot for the idea of having full posts replicated here, actually. I’m just worried that it’ll have horrible SEO consequences (I know, I know…) to duplicate the text in full.

In the worst case, I guess you could block googlebot & co from the bbs domain? Search results from forum posts don’t seem that important, somehow.

not a bad idea

But that’d make the forums unsearchable.

From google, yes - if they get an internal forum search up that might not be too bad, though … hmm.

True, but the current forum search would need a lot of beefing up before it became a suitable replacement. And hopefully wouldn’t require signing in before letting someone search - I loathe ending up on some random forum and not being able to find the post that Google teased was there all because the internal search required an account to use.

Ah yes, I believe that’s one of phpBB’s extra-annoying features.

I think you can just mark out stuff in a page to be nonindexed, without robot.txting the whole thing into the can

Aha, you can put googleoff: all and googleon: all in HTML comment tags, and google will skip the parts in between. It won’t help you with Bing, but it’s still neat.

Why, it’s the only kind of feature phpBB offers! (obligatory)

This is limited to Google Search Appliance only from what I can tell.

I think we can have the cake and eat it at the same time.

For indexing purposes we can set the canonical to a version of the page that has the first post stripped or heavily condensed.

That way when google index they will still be able to see all the comments and deep link and the world would be a happier place.

I would love to have the full text here cause it would empower the community much more and allow people to more easily deal with articles, quote bits and so on.

Not being able to quote bits from the post is quite annoying. Plus, we all start to write things and then refer back to the post and realize that we read it wrong the first time.

I’m pretty sure all the commenters here are careful to read it right the first time.

heh. thank you for assuming the best of me. but you’re wrong

Perhaps not entirely surprising; I guess they don’t want malicious and/or SEO-optimized pages to show the user things the googlebot skips. Slightly less of an issue when trawling an intranet.

I had actually read this in the early hours of signing up but did not remember.

I’m glad Jeff mentioned this discussion in another topic because I’d like to… uh, 8th? the suggestion.

@beschizza how do we go about making progress here, is this on the cards? Do you need anything from us?

At the bare minimum I am going to add a setting to the WordPress plugin for mirroring of posts and play around with the indexing to make sure you don’t lose pagerank on the main site.

Now that it’s been running for a while, the consensus is that BBS should have neither truncated excerpts nor full content. Truncation is frustrating to read, while duplication in full makes the site and the forums feel weakly integrated with one another.

The thought is that reading and commenting should be as simple and flowing as possible: read the post on the site, then land right into the discussion without unnecessary duplication.

At the Boing Boing end, we have a UX problem in that the link to the forum thread is buried under a lot of stuff after the post. Like so:

You wouldn’t even know there was a thread to go to. Instead, we’re going to make it look like this:

An immediate call to action. Few (if any) forum comments republished at the blog itself. This makes for a more natural and less confusing jump from one environment to the other. Less duplication all-round, less of a feeling that the forums are a “second class” version of the original post.

This leaves a new challenge here, though, jn that threads here would then be ‘headless’, except for the headline itself and a link to the original post, until at least one person has commented. My first thought is that if no-one’s commented, there should just be a comment box. But that seems at odds with the Discourse comment popup concept.

Blech. Worst of both worlds. So now I have to go back to looking at the site again? Can I claim for a new mouse for twice the clicking required when visiting BB now?