GTServices

You can add them manually as you would normally (via backend). (just leave the 'Show Groups in Registration' setting disabled)

4.5x file uploaded ... just waiting for approval

This is HUGE. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!

It's done but I won't make it available today as planned. It will be available end of week (March 20). This will allow me time to test the app.

My goal is to get it up this weekend.

Thank you for reporting. I'll get this fixed. Plus, I need to upgrade to 4.5. 😉 I believe this is what you are looking for... the tabbed UI are groups ... it will fetch members based on the active tab

Starting a successful forum these days is not easy. But, it is doable when site has a focus (niche). 1. Create CONTENT. You need content to keep readers coming back for more. Create different types of CONTENT to grab different kinds of people. Here are some ideas... Discussions FAQs Images (eg. to share, download, create a story, etc) Articles News etc 2. Differentiate your site from your competition. First impression is important. 3. Invite people via social, email, word-of-mouth, etc. 4. (Onboarding) Create a helpful "Welcome Email Message" for new members. You can use this opportunity to help them take action (make a post), to inform, etc. 5. Stay active on your site and with members.

The "email confirmation link" is ?do=validate and redirects to main page (root domain). The actual registration process is... (register page)/ - landing page (register page)/?do=validating - landing page after submission

The issue here is that Google will still go to those pages crawl and at some point index. This process takes away from indexing more important pages in a timely manner. (They will continue to revisit the page; Otherwise, comments would be ignored.) This affects people with lots of pages especially if you just migrated to a new system or rebuild your sitemap. You want to help Google as much as you can. It benefits you the most. (I removed my previous comment that was here as I believe it will just confuse more than help) The goal is to get Google to index/rank your quality pages faster asap.

Good advice @Durango but admins need to pay attention to their Sitemap settings as well. Personally, I prefer not to NOINDEX all profiles. I think SOME member pages should get indexed. For example, I see that some writers, experts, and staff pages bring in good organic traffic. Plus, we are trying to build a "community". Not just a content site. A community is about it's members.

Be cautious when NOINDEXing topics in masses. If you made a mistake NOINDEXing a topic that has been indexed for years, it may take a while for Google to reindex (1 to several months). What's worse is that you may end up with a lower rank. You are forcing Google to recrawl/reindex the page. Older topics will get hit the hardest. With that said, there are some pages you can safely NOINDEX. I would start with Profile pages. They suck up your crawl rate. NOINDEX inactive accounts and maybe accounts that have 10 or less posts. You can already do this with IPS. If you have RSS generated pages, you may want to consider removing them as well. These are just copied content from external sites. Not useful in terms of Organic Search unless they have lots of comments. Manually review any that have lots of comments. A great way to do this is to review your Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search > Landing Page data. Check how much traffic a page has been bringing in the past 7, 30, and 180 days. You may be surprised to find out that some "thin content" pages are actually bringing in traffic. Compare the numbers with other pages on your site. IMPORTANT: Make sure you are comparing the right numbers. Organic Search is all about USERS not Pageviews. NOTE: Most sites really don't have an issue with crawl rate. For sites that migrated to IPS (ie. vbulletin to IPS) the biggest issue occurs with change in URLs. This affects topics, images, and profiles. The bigger your site the longer it will take to climb back up. Many site owners don't realize how much traffic Image Search brings in until it's too late. If I remember correctly, IPS doesn't offer any redirects for attachments/images with migration. They only offer redirects for topics/forums. However, if forum URLs lack forum ids* (which some vbulletin SEO tools offered) than this is something that IPS doesn't offer out of the box. You will need custom code for this. * domain.com/forum-name/ Before you mass NOINDEXing, I recommend the following... Check URLs in Analytics that may be affected. DO NOT NOINDEX BLINDLY. If you NOINDEX 5,000 topics that generated an avg 10 USERS per week. Than you are looking at 50,000 USERS lost for the week. Let's say your site has an avg 1.5 Pages/Session. That's equivalent to 75,000 pageviews lost for the week. Have ads on the site? The avg is 3 ad slots per page. That's 225,000 impressions lost for the week. 1 million impressions lost for the month

I'll see what I can do for the next update.

TIP 1: If you are paying over $100 per month for S3 services you may want to consider a dedicated server @ $120 + Stackpath CDN @ $25. As your site traffic increases so will your S3 costs. You can sync your local static folders to the new server so that all images are copied to the new server. The CDN will then fetch the static files from the new server. TIP 2: If you stick with S3 make sure you use a CUSTOM DOMAIN so that all your static files are using a domain that you control - that you can move over to another service in case costs keep climbing. If you don't do this you can lose SEO from images, pdfs, etc that are currently driving traffic to your site when and if you decide to move to another service.

We used something similar in my vbulletin days. It was a plugin that allowed us to group tags (synonyms). LOVED IT. Even if they started small (with tags first) ... it will still be a HUGE win for us. I'm guessing Taxonomies will be available in IPS 5.0.

Most ad partners will just approve your domains across the board (unless one is against TOS). I haven't run into any issues with ad partners approving domains and I've been doing this for a long time. For the most part, you will use key-values to target specific forums/pages on your site. This is usually associated with Direct Sales. eg. someone wants to target your ABC, MNO, and XYZ forums on your site. Key-values allows you to do just that. Placements are not required.