Posting Articles In The "general" Forum

[Steve2UK]

Today I posted a news article in the General forum and, following recommended procedure as I have before, I then used the "Report" button to send the following message: "Eligible for transfer to News Clippings? If so, please do".

Shortly afterwards, I received a PM from an Admin as follows: "Thank you for your report drawing attention to the interesting news report you posted. Unfortunately, moving it to News Clippings cannot be considered because this would change its URL and thus lead to a dead link, given that Google indexes ThaiVisa pages at very short intervals, sometimes within 30 seconds. Apparently, the more popular a site is, the faster it gets indexed by search engines".

I replied (in part) as follows: "I have done the same with two Nation articles recently - and the URLs I included then work 100% fine after transfer to News Clippings from General - feel free to check them as I just have............... I confess I'm not clear from what you say just why the the IPS article's URL should be any different from those?"

I then got a reply saying (in part): "Myself, I don't really know how this indexing works but the mod/admin team has instructions not to move posts except where unavoidable." [my bold emphasis]

I have two questions arising from this:

1) Will Admin please explain in further detail just what happens to a URL when the post containing it is moved from one part of the forum to another - it certainly seems to have made no difference to URLs on other moved posts that I have checked including, of course, the two which I posted myself and mentioned above. If the URL did get altered in some way so as to make the link "dead" after transfer, is it really not practicable for the responsible Mod moving the post to check and if necessary re-apply the original URL so that it isn't "dead" in the new location? After all, it's not like this situation happens very often.......

2) If non-Mods/Admins are not allowed to post directly into News Clippings (I don't disagree with that policy) and are invited (as per sbk) to post first in General and then request a transfer to News Clippings - how does this square with the "don't move" instructions cited above?

The article in question is a self-evidently authoritative IPS news report (i.e. not just some "blog") of the just-concluded Mekong Media Forum held in Chiang Mai - a gathering of about 220 media professionals (mainly journalists) from the region. It can currently be found at http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?s=...t&p=3202482 - still in the General forum; I think I'm not alone in seeing it as having more than passing relevance to discussions already taking place in News Clippings.

[d0ndela]

The URL of a thread does not change despite it being moved. You can see each thread has it's own ID number, for example this thread has 322043, it would keep the same ID number if it was moved. The only thing (that I know of) that can cause irregularities with google is if the title of a thread is modified, because the title is partially put into the URL for SEO reasons. However links do not become dead due to titles changing, try yourself to edit the url of this topic in your browser, it makes no difference, only thing that matters is the ID number at the end, the rest doesn't.

However you can imagine if you make a thread with a title somewhere on the lines of: "Great Italian food in Chiang Mai", it will be indexed by google shortly thereafter thus appearing very high on google searches for those keywords due to thaivisa.com's extremely good pagerankings. Then if you edit the title to "Condo recommendations in Phuket?" the visitors from google would get pretty disappointed

[Maestro]

Since I was the cause of this topic I feel I should post here to admit that I gave erroneous information to Steve2UK. Contrary to what I believed to be the case, moving a topic does not change the URL, does not cause a dead link. It is merging topics and moving posts from one topic to another that must not be done.

The topic in question in General Topics has now, after review by other admins, been moved to the Chiang Mai News forum.

My apologies to Steve2UK for my misunderstanding.

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Maestro

[Steve2UK]

Since I was the cause of this topic I feel I should post here to admit that I gave erroneous information to Steve2UK. Contrary to what I believed to be the case, moving a topic does not change the URL, does not cause a dead link. It is merging topics and moving posts from one topic to another that must not be done.

The topic in question in General Topics has now, after review by other admins, been moved to the Chiang Mai News forum.

My apologies to Steve2UK for my misunderstanding.

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Maestro

A slight correction to the above........

The topic (which has nothing whatever to do with Chiang Mai except that CM was merely the venue for the conference) has been moved to the "Chiang Mai News and Events" forum - effectively a sub-forum of the Chiang Mai sub-forum. There it enjoys the company of such worthy postings as:

T.i.t.s Radio Relaunch Party At Club Martini, Date: 12 December 2009

The Chiang Mai Music Festival, Date: 11 December 2009

Charity Marathon To Doi Suthep, Date: 10 - 12 December 2009

Garage Sale At Lanna International School, Date: 5th December 2009

Even a cursory reading of the article reveals that the conference is over, finished, concluded - the second paragraph says "the just-concluded Mekong Media Forum here" [my emphasis]. Whatever else it is (was), it is not an event to be advertised along with garage sales in Chiang Mai.

Following the same logic of placing this article in the Chiang Mai forum, topics relating to this year's ASEAN summits would be in the Phuket/Pattaya/Hua Hin sub-forums.

No blame attaches to Maestro for the original error - an honest misunderstanding. Which now leaves us with trying to understand the logic of what is going on here. If Admin don't see fit to move it to News Clippings - so be it. But at least leave it in the General section - which covers all matters Thailand-related......... and not just Chiang Mai "events", be they garage sales or marathon runs.

In case those reading all this have lost sight of what the journalists' conference report dealt with - here again is the link to the original report: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49666

Edited December 14, 2009 by Steve2UK

[Maestro]

Steve2UK has received a detailed explanation by PM about the handling of his request to move his topic.

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Maestro