About getting organized and moving teh important stuff to here

[Legacy_Urk]

               I'm not too worried. From a Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) perspective putting this much content out to pasture would be just plain stupid. Unless the webmasters here are total morons, and I have reason to believe they're not, they'll port the information over to a new template. It's not that hard. Even if the two systems are completely incompatible a script can be written that will convert the relevant parts of the pages to a CSV file, and another can be used to write it into any new format. Put this content onto a new template with nice keyword rich links built into it pointing to whomever actually owns the content (most likely Bio and/or Atari) and you have an SEO wet dream.

Nobody with an IQ over 25 just throws away 20,000+ pages of unique content.

If they really want to benefit from an SEO perspective they'll use 301 redirects to make sure the currently indexed pages don't come up with 404 errors. This means the filenames of the pages will most likely be left unchanged (good news for bookmarks).

The only downside is that these pages most likely won't be searchable from within these forums. That could be done with some fancy scripting, too, but it would be a lot of work and there's be no SEO benefit, so they probably won't bother. But you could still use Google advanced search to find archived pages by limiting your search to "bioware.com" (or whatever).
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Urk, 14 juillet 2010 - 03:41 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_pkpeachykeen]

               Whether we can search the pages from the forum depends on how the forums work and how they write the pages.

For example, if they were using phpBB, they could just write a script to dump the old post titles and texts and recreate them here, and the forum would auto-add them and they'd be searchable. This looks more like a custom forum software, though, so I'm not really sure.

I'll be personally archiving as much as I can (a habit of mine, having seen too many sites with rare mods go down over the years). What I do get will be made public (unless authors request otherwise) on my personal server, at least until I know it has a safe and solid home elsewhere.