Wikidot Community

I haven't deleted anything. Just hide things.

Should I just delete the threads?

Will
Black Belt Wiki

You can delete individual posts, but there's no way to fully delete threads. You can move them to a hidden category, but I don't think that totally hides them from search engines.

Deleting the forum category pages should do the trick, but if you decided to resurrect your forum later I believe all of the old threads will come back to life because those records will still be in Wikidot's database and are linked to your site's forum. The developers may be able to purge those records if you ask them nice. ;-)

What you may want to consider is switching to a forum that is page-based and doesn't use the built-in forum structure. There is an old discussion about that here. If you want to move in that direction and need some help, post back here. leiger is probably our resident expert in this area, but many of us know enough to provide some guidance too.

Thanks Ed!

Will
Black Belt Wiki

One last stupid question

If delete these categories via the delete page option at the bottom of wiki page (as the admin panel does not allow me to delete a category with threads)… will this cripple the forums for future use? Or will everything be okay in the future if I just create new categories or restore the categories from the "deleted:forum" files?

Thanks.

Will
Black Belt Wiki

We had such situations at the beginnng till today for newbee's , who had deleted by chance or mistake the forum page(s) by this page option instead of the thread/post option-delete.

After the question here in the forum we could tell them our outcome that after RE-creation of the forum pages all is back.

Se also our emergency help: http://community.wikidot.com/help:emergency-help#toc1 (My forum does not work !)
and for you the part http://community.wikidot.com/howto:forums-fixing-them (Forums: fixing them if yo have deleted too much)

Page based Forum:

See our Playground with the (so called) "admin forum" : http://community-playground.wikidot.com/admin-forum:start

and the explanations for this: http://community-playground.wikidot.com/admin-forum

The template for such a site ( to have an example) : http://forum-template.wikidot.com/

The admin forum was a test for a private category forum for the admins of a site… not viewable by members.
But of course - the technic is usable for a standard forum also.

For a page-based forum I created a while back the things I needed to keep in mind were:

• use dataforms instead of "normal" wiki pages as this gives you control over how content is entered and makes it easier to select and layout the information

• use wiki fields in the dataforms instead of text fields, this solves problems with the layout in listpages modules

• you will need a thread category (but you don't have to call it that)

• you will need a different category for comments

• both of the above categories must be autonumbered

• in the live template of the thread category, put a NewPage module to create the comments pages and make sure you set the category (using category="comments") and set the parent page to the current (using parent=%%fullname%%)

• also in the live template of the thread category put a listpages module to list all comments where the parent is the current page. The syntax for the first line of the module would be [[module ListPages category="comment" perPage="10" order="created_at" parent="%%fullname%%" separate="false"]]

• create a page to list all threads and use the listpages module to list them and link to them

• on that page add a NewPage module to create new threads and make sure you set the category (using category="thread") and set the parent page to the current (using parent=%%fullname%%)

It works well but come back with any questions if you do go down this route.

You can change visibility of the forum category. And set it to members or even only admin/moderators.

Look at our Glossary: Private-Category

I want to remove every occurrence, but the best I can do is hide it. Sadly Google already has posts indexed. I have not updated the site in a couple of years. What I decided to do was rebuild the site from scratch using a new site URL, updating it in the process and retaining URL integrity so that I don't get dropped in the SERPS. Then when I'm done I will delete the current site and rename the new site to the old URL keeping all page names and images the same so that I don't ruin any SEO. I've changed the site so many times and it's a mess. When I'm done I think I will go with a Discuss comment system. I did a test run and like it a lot, it auto detects most spam and has a system whereby others can mark a post as spam and it even gives me the IP of the poster so I can add their IP to my admin panel blocking them both from my site and from commenting.

As for the forum spam, yes I'm well aware as I've been watching the community forum for over a year now. The spammers that post 20+ posts in one night, all saying the same thing are most annoying. I want to shake them and explain that that's not how you promote a website and I feel sorry for any business that is paying them, thinking that they are getting legitimate service.

P.S. This is Whane, I forgot that I had switched accounts.

I have to agree, killing a user helps not really, removes only the posts and not the thread … ( i had some discussion how to get this done
You need not to delete your old site, make it "private" for you only, (delete all members) for saving the content if you have enough sites possible….

Excuse me for joining in, but will you clarify: we cannot actually delete a forum thread; only move it to a hidden category?

Yes, exactly the status !
There is no DELETE button at the thread-level .. :(

(The "delete" at the page bottom is for the general PAGE "forum:thread" )

I have asked one of the developers qbout deletion of a complete category ( container) with the posible reuse of the old c-number…have to wai for answer now…

I don't mind starting over with a new site from scratch, it really needs the work, but some things do bother me about it:

1. Losing the dates on article and review pages, when I remake the site the date will appear the same for all, it's more natural to see dates covering a wide range of time and with a number of articles all having the same date stamp, it appears spammy.

2. Losing members. Granted, the site only has maybe 40 members, 99% of them are probably inactive but it's an ego thing and when I display a list of members it encourages others t join too. Starting over means losing that list of site members.

3. Risk of making a mistake. For example I use pinterest to help promote the site, but if I miss an image on the new site then some of promotional effort will be broken.

I only get about 1000-2000 visitors per month depending on the season (currently at 2000, sometimes as low as 500) but the site means more to me than visitors as it was the first wikidot site I built back in 2007. I'd really prefer to get it back in shape without a complete wipe. I didn't realize until now that I could not actually delete a forum, threads, etc…

To give an example of how this effects Google. When I listed all pages using the list pages module, it showed around 120 results but Google has 324 pages indexed, that's a lot of "junk" pages for Google to index that will never be ranked. In trying to decide which pages I want to retain, I've pruned out about 60 pages so my list all pages now shows 66, but won't get rid of all the oddball pages like individual forum posts. It's really messing with my OCD because I went into this with the goal being to have ZERO issues.

Also, DELETED portions of the forum (I.E. posts and categories moved to the "hidden" area) are still indexed by google, even if they don't appear to users. Here is proof of google showing 56 results for forum pages on my site, note the deleted threads results. This is a third of the posts on my site that are indexed in Google: https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=site%3Apbbg.wikidot.com%2F+inurl%3Aforum&gws_rd=ssl

Hi, I can wipe out forum threads from pbbg.wikidot.com site if You wish.?

Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate it… but there is no need as I'm nearly done with copying the site content and will be replacing it sometime this weekend. I just rebuilt it and I only have one category left to copy and it's only about a dozen pages. I'm pretty sure that when I delete the site, then rename the new site to the deleted site then all will be well.