Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Standarizing forums.arcademuseum.com (combine forums.klov.com into it)

What we are thinking of doing:

We are thinking of keeping the forums solely up at forums.arcade-museum.com, and having forums.klov.com redirect to the former, instead of being an alias of it.

Since moving to vbulletin, the forums have been accessible via: forums.klov.com as well as forums.arcade-museum.com. With the new change, typing in any forums.klov.com would simply take you to the same address on forums.arcade-museum.com.

The positive side of this:

-- You could access the forums via either URL.

The negative side is is becomming more and more obvious all the time:

-- Lowers our search engine results, since Google et al see both sites as having duplicate content. While we could block Google from seeing one of these sites, other problems (and wasted search engine benefit) would arise when users link to URLs on the blocked side

-- There is a need to fix problems caused by running the forums on 2 URLs, which wastes time we could use for other upgrades. Additionally, some of these issues don't seem to get our attention quickly (ie: any time the site emails anyone a URL it currently isn't including the domain name in the link, so the link doesn't work).

-- Inability to quickly update the software on the site and to add new features without issues popping up. We just added a trader rating system, eBay style, though it currently can only be seen by admins (trader ratings are not the same thing as reputation which was turned on earlier today). Our weird site settings are creating issues with it. Though we could easily fix these issues, these fixes would ad yet one more piece of customization to the forums making it more labor intensive to upgrade in the future, and thus likely making upgrades less frequent.

What this would mean.

-- Any time anyone went to forums.klov.com it would redirect to forums.arcade-museum.com

-- Any url within the forums on klov.com would also redirect. In other words, if you bookmarked a forums.klov.com thread or msg it would simply change the name in the browser for you and take you to the same page on forums.arcade-museum.com

The positives of changing:

-- Fixes all the negatives I've mentioned above.

-- Trader ratings would roll out at the same time (which in turn would hopefully help to further cut down on flame/personal attack wars at the same time).


The negatives of changing:

-- It is always possible that some corporate or educational networks might block 'forums.arcade-museum.com' and yet not 'forums.klov.com' simply because their firewall sees the word 'arcade'.

-- Some people may like things the way they are

-- forums.arcade-museum.com is a longer url than forums.klov.com, though remember, typing it the later would always take you to the former.

Longer road.

-- Similar issues affect the main KLOV.com and ARCADE-MUSEUM.com web sites. Search engines may punish us for having 'duplicative' content. Logging into one site and jumping to the other means you are again, not logged in. I'm inclined to keep mostly just the KLOV database on KLOV.com, and have not only the forums but online library, vaps, etc. solely on an arcade-museum.com address (with links from KLOV just like there are now).

Thoughts and comments...?​
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