SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum

[likedeeler]

redwave recently remarked:

The links on search engines to this forum are extensive and concerning [...]

I'd like to ask the administrators to consider removing LMT from search engines. This may help to bring the number of anonymous guests vs users visiting the site more into balance again. The admin dashboard of the forum software should offer options to do this. Also check out https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing.

What do you think?

[Yohanes Salomo]

I had a bad feeling about this, but we'll see. 🤔

[Mr]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I honestly don't think that's a great idea - most of our members have stumbled upon this forum through search engines and later joined it, myself included.
We did attempt to gate off the forum once in the past, and it didn't turn out very well.

Anonymous visitors are to be expected when hosting any website, it's not really a problem in itself.
I'll add though, that the web in its entirety is being scraped and crawled at a much higher rate after the LLM/"AI" boom, so I suspect some of our incoming traffic are bots who will never directly interact with the site beyond observation.

[redwave]

To clarify, my suggestion was to make the sharing parts of the forum for members only, retaining full access for the rest of the site.

It’s important that the forum is discoverable on search engines, just the less sensitive parts.

[MrDonut2534]

or using /robots.txt instead.

learn more how to use it here: h77p$://www.robotstxt.org/