Google searches of old forum embarrassing

[fireball241_jt]

When a simple forum search shows broken links to a game potential players assume it is old and worn out and has little depth of thought left.

First impressions....

Fix the old forum links on search engines. Change them back to the old links and redo the links on this new forum that is practically dead anyway.

 

[Wender]

Yes, there is a lot of good information there, new players can't be expected to go to this forum and then search, they're goingo to google their specific issue (be it about a quest, build, etc.), and it's a pity that relevant forum headlines will pop up and then... sorry but maintenance.

Can't some kind of redirect be done here? Since forums-old is working...

 

[axel15810]

SSG/Daybreak badly needs to update the "down for maintenance" message to something along the lines of "You are trying to access the DDO forums through an old link, you can find the new forums here (insert new DDO forums URL)". That would funnel people to the new forums. I don't know how Daybreak's system works but I wouldn't think it'd be that hard to update the text on the page. It's a real problem. Every time anyone searches for information about DDO on google they are flooded with pages and pages of links funneling them to a dead end maintenance page for a game which isn't actually down for maintenance. There are links to Daybreak's social media and such but that doesn't help people searching for DDO.

 

[raesene]

Technically, I'd have thought they could do some URL re-writing with a proxy server to re-direct requests to the old forum pages to the "forums-old.ddo.com" site. The URL paths look sufficiently different to make that workable. I'm kind of surprised it's not been done.

 

[Ahpuch]

SSG/Daybreak badly needs to update the "down for maintenance" message to something along the lines of "You are trying to access the DDO forums through an old link, you can find the new forums here (insert new DDO forums URL)". That would funnel people to the new forums. I don't know how Daybreak's system works but I wouldn't think it'd be that hard to update the text on the page. It's a real problem. Every time anyone searches for information about DDO on google they are flooded with pages and pages of links funneling them to a dead end maintenance page for a game which isn't actually down for maintenance. There are links to Daybreak's social media and such but that doesn't help people searching for DDO.

That would help but since they can map "forums.ddo.com/forums" to the maintenance message (or an alternate page as you suggest) they could just as easily map it to "forums-old.ddo.com/forums" either directly or through an URL rewrite service that will send the user to old-forum URL. This is not rocket science and when I say "rocket science" I mean the science of taking rockets (ie the candy) from a baby at halloween. It is that easy.

 

[axel15810]

That would help but since they can map "forums.ddo.com/forums" to the maintenance message (or an alternate page as you suggest) they could just as easily map it to "forums-old.ddo.com/forums" either directly or through an URL rewrite service that will send the user to old-forum URL. This is not rocket science and when I say "rocket science" I mean the science of taking rockets (ie the candy) from a baby at halloween. It is that easy.

I would understand them not wanting to funnel people to the old forums, since they are now read only and phased out. Funneling them to the new forum even if it doesn't directly give them the info they were searching for seems to make sense to me. But either way would be vastly better than the maintenance page people are currently being sent to.

 

[Fhrek]

either directly or through an URL rewrite service that will send the user to old-forum URL.

not wanting to funnel people to the old forums, since they are now read only and phased out.

I'm not a internet Wizard, but there isn't a way to make the old forum works as "archives domain" like some Journals and Magazines do with their older content?

Sometimes as a content analysis scientist I have some links that were used as reference to citations that nowadays I access and the link is marked as "Archives". Wouldn't SSG/Daybreak do the same?

The old forum content would be available, but the google engine should always funnel searchs to the new forum, right?

 

[Ahpuch]

I would understand them not wanting to funnel people to the old forums, since they are now read only and phased out. Funneling them to the new forum even if it doesn't directly give them the info they were searching for seems to make sense to me. But either way would be vastly better than the maintenance page people are currently being sent to.

That's a good point. But they should be able to pop a banner on the old forums to direct users to the new ones. There are currently 4 banner messages on the old forums that could be removed and replaced with a message like:
Notice: These forums are archived discussions and readonly. CLICK HERE to go to the current forums for DDO.

In fact, they should add that banner even if they don't support mapping to it with old URLs.

 

[Ahpuch]

My most recent use of google seems to show Google no longer gives links to the old forums. It must have decided they were dead links after so many weeks of redirection to a maintenance page. Is that good or bad?

It is good that links that just take users to the maintenance page are gone. It is bad that a bunch of searches that would have led users to the SSG official forums and useful info are now gone. Some companies would have paid for that kind of exposure from google.

But this doesn't remove the desirability of maintaining links to the old forum content. Those links are still in peoples book marks, hardcoded in Facebook pages, buried in email and being delivered from other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

It's pretty trivial in any web server to just set a redirect to the new forum URL. There are at least two ways of doing this via HTTP messages (soft and hard redirects). No complex proxy rewriting needed.

Agree, this should be done.

 

[Ahpuch]

It's pretty trivial in any web server to just set a redirect to the new forum URL. There are at least two ways of doing this via HTTP messages (soft and hard redirects). No complex proxy rewriting needed.

Agree, this should be done.

This feature is so common, the biggest challenge for the team is likely on whether to implement it in the forum code, the web server, on the firewall, or on the load balancer.

 

[Onyxia2016]

The trouble is the link to the new forum is what the old one was. All of Google indexing is wrong now.
Should have created a new sub-domain for the new forum with a pinned message in the old forum to the new link and of course lock the old forum so it is read only. This would allow the old search engine and YouTube links to work.

As it is now you can copy the link from the search engine and change the forums.ddo.com to forums-old.ddo.com.
YouTube is a little more involved. Also need the sub-domain changed and you need to replace the %2F html url encoding in the URL with a / and then chop off the &v=XXXXXXX at the very end.

As for the maintenance page, I am pretty sure that is a general replacement for a 404 page not found error.
Could still be made to work by grabbing the referring URL, doing the fix up mention above and send the user to the old forum.
With the talent they have in-house I am sure they have the skillset needed. If not I would be happy to help (no charge)

 

[Sylvado]

I don't see the problem, the old forums has a search feature

 

[Ahpuch]

The trouble is the link to the new forum is what the old one was. All of Google indexing is wrong now.
Should have created a new sub-domain for the new forum with a pinned message in the old forum to the new link and of course lock the old forum so it is read only. This would allow the old search engine and YouTube links to work.

As it is now you can copy the link from the search engine and change the forums.ddo.com to forums-old.ddo.com.
YouTube is a little more involved. Also need the sub-domain changed and you need to replace the %2F html url encoding in the URL with a / and then chop off the &v=XXXXXXX at the very end.

As for the maintenance page, I am pretty sure that is a general replacement for a 404 page not found error.
Could still be made to work by grabbing the referring URL, doing the fix up mention above and send the user to the old forum.
With the talent they have in-house I am sure they have the skillset needed. If not I would be happy to help (no charge)

Except its not. The domain is the same but the URL is distinct:
New: https://forums.ddo.com/index.php
Old: https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php

that /forums subfolder is enough to direct to old forum links to the old forums.

And yes the maintenance page is just a really bad 404 page. A 404 page with useful information would be more helpful.

 

[Onyxia2016]

The Sphinx search plugin for Vbulletin is not bad and far better than the default that comes with Vbulletin but either are a good as Google's indexing. This is why you see a fair amount of sites doing a "Search with Google" on their website

 

[Ahpuch]

I don't see the problem, the old forums has a search feature

The problem (and granted on the scale of 1 to 10 on DDO problem list this is likely around a 2) is that people with old links don't even get to the old forums. They get a DayBreakGames maintenance page. That page doesn't help. It literally says:

"Yes, you're in the right place! Unfortunately we are not, but hope to be getting there very soon. Please check back later."

They don't even get a reference to the new forums. They don't get told it is now the wrong link and how to get where they want.

"Yes, you're in the right place!"

They are told to try the same link later. If they are not an experienced DDO forum users they will never get to that helpful search feature. The fact that SSG has left this so long indicates a lack of care for their image IMO.

 

[Onyxia2016]

Except its not. The domain is the same but the URL is distinct:
New: https://forums.ddo.com/index.php
Old: https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php

that /forums subfolder is enough to direct to old forum links to the old forums.

And yes the maintenance page is just a really bad 404 page. A 404 page with useful information would be more helpful.

I had never notice the extra "forums" in there. In that case simple and Apache has built in functions for this.
"mod_alias" and "mod_rewrite"

 

[Xan]

I had never notice the extra "forums" in there. In that case simple and Apache has built in functions for this.
"mod_alias" and "mod_rewrite"

What is Apache?
Edit: Ok, something on their "Apache Server" side to redirect URLs

 

[Sylvado]

The problem (and granted on the scale of 1 to 10 on DDO problem list this is likely around a 2) is that people with old links don't even get to the old forums. They get a DayBreakGames maintenance page. That page doesn't help. It literally says:

"Yes, you're in the right place! Unfortunately we are not, but hope to be getting there very soon. Please check back later."

They don't even get a reference to the new forums. They don't get told it is now the wrong link and how to get where they want.

"Yes, you're in the right place!"

They are told to try the same link later. If they are not an experienced DDO forum users they will never get to that helpful search feature. The fact that SSG has left this so long indicates a lack of care for their image IMO.

There is a sticky at the top of this topic with the link. I go back to the old forums often without any issues.

 

[Ahpuch]

There is a sticky at the top of this topic with the link. I go back to the old forums often without any issues.

I go to the old forums as well. We know how to do it. That is not really the point.

Someone who does a search using Bing and getting an old link goes to the maintenance page. They may not use the forums regularly and have no idea that the forums have moved and the link needs to be altered to work (and going to the old forum link wipes the link to bounce the user to the maintenance page so editing it is still problematic). In other words the mapping to the old forums is awful and could easily be better.