Forum Closed Page Title
Printed From: Web Wiz Forums
Category: Web Wiz Web App Support Forums
Forum Name: Web Wiz Forums
Forum Description: Support forum for Web Wiz Forums application.
URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=19124
Printed Date: 12 April 2026 at 5:20pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Forum Closed Page Title
Posted By: wistex
Subject: Forum Closed Page Title
Date Posted: 03 April 2006 at 1:39pm
I just discovered something annoying. I recently moved my website & forum to another web host, and locked the site using WWF so that it said it was down for maintenance to prevent database changes during the move.
Well, Yahoo! came by and decided to index my website while the website was down... and changed the title of my website to the title on the forum closed page!!! So if you did a search for my website in Yahoo! it said it was closed... in Yahoo's listings!
Luckily they have come back and reindexed the pages and changed the listing back, but I had users calling me telling me the forum was down when in reality Yahoo's listing said it was down and if they clicked on the link they would have found it was up. I estimated that we lost about 20% of our traffic due to this problem because people didn't click through.
I would suggest changing the title on the forum closed page to just have the name of the forum or website. On the page itself you can say the forum is closed, but not in the title of the page. That would probably help prevent something like this from happening again.
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http://www.wistex.com" rel="nofollow - WisTex Solutions
http://www.caribbeanchoice.com/forums" rel="nofollow - CaribbeanChoice Forums
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Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 03 April 2006 at 5:17pm
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It's something I have never even thought about, but I have made the change for the next version.
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Posted By: wistex
Date Posted: 03 April 2006 at 5:26pm
I didn't think about it either until now.
At first I was confused why people were saying it said "forum closed" when it was open. I thought perhaps the DNS hadn't propogated yet (the old server was set to closed, but the new server was set to open). But then a friend called from the office I work in and said it was closed, and I knew for a fact that it could be accessed from that office since I had tried it there earlier. After asking a few questions I found out he wasn't even clicking on the link in Yahoo! since it said it was closed. (He entered the URL in Yahoo's search box instead of in the address bar.) When he clicked on the link, it was, of course, open.
It was a good thing I asked a few more questions and knew his browsing habits (i.e. he types the URLs into yahoo.com instead of the browser address bar), otherwise I would have never known.
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http://www.wistex.com" rel="nofollow - WisTex Solutions
http://www.caribbeanchoice.com/forums" rel="nofollow - CaribbeanChoice Forums
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