Forum Changes 2 - It's Very Long But Please Take The Time

Moving of the forum is 99% done, the reasons for the move are below.

The move has essentially separated the forum from the rest of the cancuncare site. It will be regarded by Google as being a different site.

There were several problems:

 

How Google Sees The Site

There are 120,000 pages in the forum and 100 or so pages on the main site. The main site is full of useful information and is integral in driving new members here.

However, those pages were drowned out by the sheer number of forum pages by comparison. 99.999% of the site was seen as forum pages.

Many of those 120,000 pages are pretty useless - no need for Google to index pages about Oasis Viva which closed 5 years ago or the thousands of off topic threads in Free For All, Roll calls from 2006 or someone's member profile who joined 8 years ago and never came back.

When Google crawls the site it allocates a limited crawl budget. It crawls a certain amount of pages and then leaves the rest for another time. Every time it visited it was bogged down by all these useless pages and the crawl budget ran out before it got to see the 0.001 % of really good content.

It regarded the site as a whole of being of little value since much of the content was either "thin" (not much detail such as empty user profiles) out of date (old roll calls) or not relevant to the site (2012 MLB Play off thread)

As such it devalued the site as a whole, including the really useful stuff which ultimately brings new blood to the forum itself via people researching TTR on Google and finding their way here.

Additionally, the forum trend towards increasingly sexually related material especially in the media albums was attracting incoming links from porn sites. Unwanted visitors who didnt come because they wanted to find out about Temptation or Cancun but because they wanted to leer over the half naked photos in the albums. Because of those links Google cant make it's mind up whether we are a porn site or not.

More on this later, but I believe this further damaged the site.

By separating the forum out, Google will treat the forum part separately and hopefully reward the main site with better rankings, and as a result bring more of the right kind of people to the forum. It can use it's crawl budget on things I want it to see, and not waste it on things I dont.

This is not an exact science but I am hopeful it will fix many issues for the non forum parts of cancuncare.

However, that still leaves us with some issues on the forum so there are further changes explained below.

 

Forum Changes

I explained above about how the Forum has so much irrelevant content in Google such as member profiles and old redundant forum sections, and that this uses up a crawl budget that could be better used on the content that is worthwhile.

Therefore all member profiles, media pages (i.e uploaded pics) and redundant forum sections are to be noindexed. This means they will drop out of Google eventually and will never be crawled again.

This has more advantages though. It means people wont be able to find you on Google by typing in your username. It means that any pics you upload to your albums wont end up in Google images and are less likely to be shared on porn or nsfw sites.

The forum also asked new registrations for "name" and a lot of people were using their real name as a result. I have changed this to ask for "username". Hopefully, this will cut down on the number of people using their real name and also the number of name change requests I receive.

During my research I saw that there are a significant amount of people who actually arrive at this site by googling a username, and I also saw that people were arriving by porn site links. Is that the kind of person we want here? I don't.

I also saw that some individual threads rank for some undesirable terms 'Brothels in Cancun', 'Prostitutes in Cancun' and others. The people that search these terms and arrive here as a result are also not people who will be valuable members of our community. Many such threads are several years old and will be deleted.

Some of these undesirable visitors end up joining as members, liking people's pics, dropping comments on their profiles, and entering into private conversations in search of more sexual pics. Many of them are fake catfishing profiles who do this for a hobby and go on to share pics they receive elsewhere, which only perpetuates the problem.

Naturally, these kind of Google searches were mainly for genuine members who have uploaded risque 'show off my wife' pics. This seems to be an increasing trend borne out of Facebook groups that encourage the same.

Often we'll see quite innocent threads take a completely off topic sexual twist, and other threads that are titled with double entendres.

This forum never used to be like that, we were heading down a slippery slope. The more sexual the forum gets, the more it encourages others to be sexual and we were in danger of becoming a haven for creepers and catfishers. Also more towards a "Tinder for TTR" kind of place. I feel that none of those are suitable for the long term good of the forum.

I should say I have no problem with lifestyle folks, they are an intrinsic part of our community. That's why I set up our sister site cancunswingers.com specifically to cater for that kind of discussion.

Cancunswingers.com is totally uncensored as far as pics go. But let's have cancuncare as a site for mainstream discussions about the amazing place we visit.

Additonally, increased sexualisation jeapordises the forum's income streams, and drives some potential members away.

Driving them not only away from the forum, but from TTR itself. Newbies are put off, regulars think the vibe has changed.

 

Photo Rules

I will also be introducing photo restrictions. If you have read above the reasons are self explanatory.

From now on all photos uploaded will not appear until approved by an Admin. Which is either Jannet or myself.

We do already have rules posted next to the upload button, but guess how many people ignored them anyway? About 60%.

This is a huge extra burden. I really don't want to be spending time approving pics one by one. But if people wont follow the rules voluntarily there's really no other option. Please read the rules and dont upload pictures that contravene them. It may take some time for your pic to be approved, but if it is not I'm not getting into a to and fro about it with you. If you persist I'll just move you to a special usergroup that cannot upload pics or view anyone elses.

Rules on the upload page state:

No nudity including topless. No sexually provocative pics such as close ups of boobs, ass etc.
No pics where the head/face has been deliberately excluded or hidden.

Nudity and topless is self explanatory. Includes those who put a tiny star or blur over a nipple. Really guys?

Sexually provocative pics. We wont approve pics where the intention is to deliberately draw attention to boobs or ass.

Excluding head and face. This is my pet peeve. If you dont want to show your face why would you want to show the rest unless it was to invite comments and likes about your or your wife's body. Would you put a headless pic in a frame in your house? Of course not, don't put it on here either.

Thongs and small bikinis are part and parcel of TTR and not a reason to be unapproved. But just be tasteful about it.

 

Summary

These forum changes have been carefully considered and researched in depth. In addition, we have made some other changes that wont impact the forum as you see it, so I haven't gone into detail. But these will help how our listings appear in Google and attract more mmbers as a consequence.

The forum is free for you to use, but is not free for me to run.

Our usual month to month running costs are not massive. However, I have recently hired a consultancy and we have spent a lot of time discussing the way forward. I have bought research tools and hired another guy to move the forum for me.

The best don't come cheap. $3.5K per month for the consultancy for the last 3 months. 10-12 hour days for me including weekends. Boobs cruises are my 'kind of' days off That's why I havent been posting much recently.

I believe these changes are for the long term good of the forum. I hope they will result in more members, more participation, more friendships formed and more great times at TTR for those that want them.

I hope the majority of you are with me ,and understand my reasoning.

Party On!