I was impressed by how fast and uncluttered this site is. In case someone else is wondering: It seems to be running https://flarum.org/, a PHP forum with a Mithril JS front-end
But it's terrible for search, both internal and external(Google).
Why ?
Let's start with internal search. Ctrl-f fails in thread search. No other mechanism to search inside a thread.
And about external search:
Permalinks to individual comments - great for the search engine when you request a very specific thing - a specific niche comment from this site could get ranked highly in google.
Also, it's making it easy to link to a great comment is import. Impossible here.
Permalinks to webpages that contain full threads - lots of relevant text for the search engine to chew on. But in flarum the content lazily loads. So maybe Google wouldn't be able to chew on all the comments.
And the fact that when Google finds a thread from the site, he doesn't say how many comments per thread , indicates that he doesn't see this as a forum, which could be bad
And all this is a real shame - it's a community with really valuable content.
It's also new forum software (I'm developing it), sort of a combination of Discourse and HN and Slack. I would think it works ok with external search? Becasue, like here at HN, good comments surface to the top, + they're included in the HTMl directly on page load. So, what a search engine sees, ought to be the original post, + the best comments.
I'm wondering, what do you mean with: "Also, it's making it easy to link to a great comment is import"? (What does "import" mean, here)
1. the way you do permlinks to individual posts looks good. It's also easily shareable. good too.
2. but probably, an even better way to do permalinks is something like quora did - just the specific answer that solves the user's problem , in a seperate non-distracting page, with a full, human readable url.
That of course creates a problem with sub-comments, but quora solved it nicely by hiding them .
3. Content quality is key for SEO. Assuming that upvotes works well for that. i don't know much about forum design, but i assume upvotes are really sensitive to the community and that's why HN is so great.
but in other communities, i wish there was a way to sense if "this answer solved the issue" or something similar, and letting that rise. That's probably one of the reasons stackoverflow won.
But forums are somewhat different so that's harder.
4. Adding that "recommended links" on the site could help SEO. but it's a shitty user experience. So probably isn't worth it.
Thanks for the feedback. Interesting to see how Quora does answer permalinks. At the same time, then other answers, aren't easily discoverable.
Yea, upvotes only work, if the community "collectively" has a good judgement :- ) Also, I'm thinking about weighting upvotes, with how good a judgement the voter seems to have, based on trust levels and fraction upvoted and downvoted answers, hmm. So a staff user's or a trusted core member's upvotes, have a bit more weight, than votes from a new and unknown person.
Perhaps it's the subject matter that has driven the site design towards a paler pastel colour palette, but I find it quite pleasing to the eye.
Although I do wonder about accessibility. Some of the lighter colours don't pass WCAG recommendations for contrast. But it's rare to find a website outside of gov.uk that even comes close.
