Cross-posting of Articles into Forum topics

[WebCMS]

When configured, it is cross-posting the entire new article content as a new forum topic.

Or is it just displaying the same article content inside topics?

Does it not result as "duplicate" content (negatively) for search engines when same content is shown in more than one place?

Maybe just post a topic with a link to the original article instead of repeating the entire article body?

[opentype]

Don’t use it. It’s a legacy feature from the time when the software was centered around the forums and cross-posting was the only way to show the forum users the articles. It’s not necessary anymore and only causes issues. 

[WebCMS]

On 11/20/2023 at 12:55 AM, opentype said:

Don’t use it. It’s a legacy feature from the time when the software was centered around the forums and cross-posting was the only way to show the forum users the articles. It’s not necessary anymore and only causes issues. 

I turned it off -

Pages > Databases > Articles > Forums tab > Post topic > OFF

 

But every new article published under Articles is still getting cross-posted into the Discussions forum along with the entire body (duplicate content). How do I stop it?

It would be ideal if just a link to the article is cross-posted in the chosen forum as a notification to the forum members of a new article but cross-posting the entire article body is just duplicate content not good for SEO.

Edited December 1, 2023 by WebCMS

[WebCMS]

Another issue is - because content is duplicated, if we modify the original article, the cross-posted forum topic will be out of sync because the topic body is different from the modified article body.

Cross-posting just a link to the article (instead of the entire article) would solve this issue as there will be only one location for the article content.

[opentype]

35 minutes ago, WebCMS said:

But every new article published under Articles is still getting cross-posted into the Discussions forum along with the entire body (duplicate content). How do I stop it?

Might be a bug. I remember seeing that behaviour. 

12 minutes ago, WebCMS said:

Cross-posting just a link to the article (instead of the entire article) would solve this issue as there will be only one location for the article content.

Which defeats the purpose of having a forum discussion for the article to begin with. People see a topic and can comment it, but they have to open the link first to read the article and then come back to use the full forum features for the discussion. It’s a mess. Like I said: it’s a legacy feature. It causes more harm than good. 

[WebCMS]

19 minutes ago, opentype said:

Might be a bug. I remember seeing that behaviour. 

Which defeats the purpose of having a forum discussion for the article to begin with. People see a topic and can comment it, but they have to open the link first to read the article and then come back to use the full forum features for the discussion. It’s a mess. Like I said: it’s a legacy feature. It causes more harm than good. 

There is an option to have all the comments on the Article itself ("Use forum for comments"). If we turn this option off, they can only comment on the article and everything (article and comments) will be in a single location (article).

Cross-posting a link to the forum would serve as a notification of a new article as people don't check check blogs and articles as much as they check forum posts. But cross-posting the entire article body in the forum topic will leave them out of sync if the article is edited later. Cross-posting just a link to the article would prevent that.

[opentype]

29 minutes ago, WebCMS said:

Cross-posting a link to the forum would serve as a notification of a new article as people don't check check blogs and articles as much as they check forum posts.

Exactly. That’s how it worked until Invision Community 3.x when everything was centered around the forums. Since 4.x, everything comes together on the Discovery feeds. That should be the place to discover new content. An Invision Community site where content needs to be discovered by browsing the forum index (and the need to click through individual forums and forum posts to get to articles, galleries or whatever) would be an awful user experience. 

Edited December 1, 2023 by opentype

[Marc]

1 hour ago, WebCMS said:

Another issue is - because content is duplicated, if we modify the original article, the cross-posted forum topic will be out of sync because the topic body is different from the modified article body.

Cross-posting just a link to the article (instead of the entire article) would solve this issue as there will be only one location for the article content.

We would need an example of this to take a look at and advise accordingly.

32 minutes ago, opentype said:

Exactly. That’s how it worked until Invision Community 3.x when everything was centered around the forums. Since 4.x, everything comes together on the Discovery feeds. That should be the place to discover new content. An Invision Community site where content needs to be discovered by browsing the forum index (and the need to click through individual forums and forum posts to get to articles, galleries or whatever) would be an awful user experience. 

In addition to what opentype has written here, the question I would be asking myself in your position wouldnt be "Why dont people check articles and blogs as often as forum posts". Its really that in which you need to answer, rather than duplicating content. After all, if you are going to do that, why not just post them in the forum only? Using things like blocks to highlight content, and indeed writing more engaging content can be helpful to achieving this. For example, you can see on our own community here we have blocks for our 2 sets of blogs on software changes on the user side and development.

[WebCMS]

I've seen analytics of a couple of forums including my own and forums module always gets most views and forum is the main/home page on most sites.

As you are aware, there are a few types of forum sites. Specific forums like IC or dev sites who develop IC apps, general forums, legal forums, gaming forums...

For forums like IC or IC devs, they just need a couple of forums revolving around their very product and they are done. There won't be anything else to discuss other than their product. And due to the single product/subject, they may be having a few more views on their articles and blogs also because there are people to write blogs/articles but forums will always be higher in terms of page views. I might have visited the IC blogs maybe a couple of times so far but forums mostly.

For general forums dealing with all kinds of subjects, a couple of forums will not cut it. A few dozen forums may suffice. When I mixed up subjects like "Food & Wine", "Health & Fitness", "Software & Hardware" into single forums to have fewer forums, it still ended up with more than 50 forums. There are large forum sites having more than 360 subforums and running for over 15 years now. Nobody visits, writes or reads blogs or articles on general forums (except may be by admins/mods out of their own interest for SEO). Cross-posting links to new articles are likely to instill interest in them among users.

On general forum sites, users have a problem, they come and post a thread, get the solution to their problem and they disappear for a while until they encounter another problem (except some die-hard experts who linger). On specific forums like IC, we need to keep checking for any product updates, tech/known issues, workarounds, etc. constantly to keep our sites running smoothly.

On specific sites like IC and legal forum sites, topics/messages/etc. are locked immediately or after 10 minutes of posting due to documentary/evidentiary/contractual value of the posted content and prevent tampering. On general forums, we allow users to edit the posted content unlimitedly for a better UX.

Blogs and articles have /blog and article/ in their URLs which may be treated differently by search engines for scoring the content's value as these are usually written by experts after doing due research.

Does Discovery Feeds mean Similar Content widget? If so, we cannot cram a lot into it, maybe 10-25 topics tops. That's not enough when a general forum site has dozens of topics posted every day and there can be dozens or even hundreds of similar content.

Cross-posting of articles as forum topics may already be used by other clients. However, it currently has some issues -

1. Even if we turn it off, it keeps cross-posting every article as a forum post and doesn't function as expected.
    
2. If the article is posted by the Admin, it gets cross-posted as a forum topic by the Admin user but the same Admin user is not able to edit the cross-posted forum topic (to convert the posted body content into a link to the article). Cross-posted forum topic can only be edited if the original article was posted by a mod/user.
    
3. It can cross-post every article to only one specified forum which is not optimal. The article posting form should have a Forum dropdown option to select to which forum the article should be cross-posted into.
    
4. Cross-posting the entire article body may get penalties from search engines for duplicated content. The content can also go out of sync if the original article is modified which is not graceful. A new option may be provided to post just a link to the original article instead of the entire body. It is perfectly fine to post a link to another content in SEO terms.

If these issues are resolved, general forum sites who want to use cross-posting articles as forum topics feature would use it.

Edited December 12, 2023 by WebCMS

[WebCMS]

As for issue #3, if the forum to cross-post the article into is not chosen (in the optional forum dropdown on the Article form), it should cross-post to the default forum set in the Articles in ACP.

This way, the cross-posting option is dynamic per-article or fallback on default forum.

Edited December 12, 2023 by WebCMS

[WebCMS]

3 hours ago, WebCMS said:

As for issue #3, if the forum to cross-post the article into is not chosen (in the optional forum dropdown on the Article form), it should cross-post to the default forum set in the Articles in ACP.

This way, the cross-posting option is dynamic per-article or fallback on default forum.

Or, if the forum to cross-post is not chosen on the Article form, it should not get cross-posted (this approach makes the forum to cross-post setting at Articles level in ACP obsolete).

[Marc]

You would need to be making a feedback topic on items you want to see here, as these are requests for change rather than bugs (with the exception of the first one which I will test and bug report if needed).

[sound]

12 hours ago, WebCMS said:

 

1. Cross-posting the entire article body may get penalties from search engines for duplicated content. The content can also go out of sync if the original article is modified which is not graceful. A new option may be provided to post just a link to the original article instead of the entire body. It is perfectly fine to post a link to another content in SEO terms.

If these issues are resolved, general forum sites who want to use cross-posting articles as forum topics feature would use it.

you should be able to achieve this by editing the content fields Topic Format

just remove the (value} shown in the form

 

This setting controls whether the field will be included in the automatically generated topic, and how to format it. Use {title} for field title, and {value} for field value. Leave empty to not include in the automatically generated topic.

 

Edited December 12, 2023 by sound

[Robert Angle]

The forum copy of an article should be able to be an excerpt, truncated, with a URL to the full article, imo. 

[rastafari]

On 12/1/2023 at 9:12 AM, WebCMS said:

I turned it off -

Pages > Databases > Articles > Forums tab > Post topic > OFF

 

But every new article published under Articles is still getting cross-posted into the Discussions forum along with the entire body (duplicate content). How do I stop it?

 

Open dropdown menu and check if anything is selected.

Unselect it and it will stop cross posting.

The "post topic" switch did not work as expected in my case.

[sound]

20 hours ago, Robert Angle said:

The forum copy of an article should be able to be an excerpt, truncated, with a URL to the full article, imo. 

 

Isn't the url always added automatically to the forum post? It is for my site

On the rest you can do this already, though the excerpt does need to be added  manually when the article is posted (a simple copy and paste?)

 

Use a new field called say 'teaser' or something and make sure that you fill in the 'Topic Format'

You can also add a character restriction to this field if needed

 

Then remove the 'Topic Format' from your original content field.

 

Then when posting the article fill in the 'excerpt' manually (copy and paste)

The above should then, when publishing an article, post as well a forum post containing an 'excerpt' (the teaser field) and a link to the article

Edited December 13, 2023 by sound

[Nathan Explosion]

Or maybe just use this as the topic format for your content field...

<div data-ipsTruncate data-ipsTruncate-size="3 lines" data-ipsTruncate-type="remove">{value}</div>

 

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by Nathan Explosion

[Robert Angle]

2 hours ago, sound said:

Isn't the url always added automatically to the forum post? It is for my site

Yes. But the entire article is cross-posted in the forum. I would like to see that snipped or summarized to avoid the double-posting issue.

The rest of your post as well as Nathan's confuses me a bit. You sound like you're talking about adding custom fields to the Pages article. Nathan mentions adding code somewhere (in CKEditor through HTML editing?). I'm not following yet, but I'll reread after another cup of caffeine, lol.

[Nathan Explosion]

1 minute ago, Robert Angle said:

Nathan mentions adding code somewhere (in CKEditor through HTML editing?)

Youre overthinking it there...

EVERY field in a Pages database has a "topic format" field - make use of it:

[Robert Angle]

Oh nice! I'm going to go experiment with that. I'm not as versed in Pages as I ought to be.

Even the name "Topic Format" is blatantly obvious, lol. I may have never looked at these settings before.

[WebCMS]

On 12/13/2023 at 9:39 AM, Nathan Explosion said:

Youre overthinking it there...

EVERY field in a Pages database has a "topic format" field - make use of it:

It was working fine with "3 lines" but  with some articles when it started posting only 1 line in the crossposted topic, I tried changing it to 5 lines, 10 lines and 12 lines - but they are all displaying just 1 line in the crossposted topic.

I know the content has HTML but nothing much to comprise 12 lines of HTML for just 1st line of content that is getting crossposted (it is crossposting only 1 line as in the following topic)

<div data-ipsTruncate data-ipsTruncate-size="12 lines" data-ipsTruncate-type="remove">{value}</div>

Navigating Video Game Ratings: A Guide for Every Gamer

Any pointers how to resolve this?

When the topic page loads, it loads the entire article in a flicker switches to 1 line. If we quickly press Esc while refreshing the page, the entire article body is rendered and also visible in Inspecgtor (without Esc it goes on to keep just 1 line and hides the rest which is not visible in Inspector)

Edited February 13 by WebCMS

[Paras]

Looks like this isn't fixed in version 5

[Marc]

21 hours ago, Paras said:

Looks like this isn't fixed in version 5

The above would need to be made as a suggestion, as nothing there is actually broken. At present its working as intended