hiding private forums to search engines ?

[ventilman]

lo there.

i would like to install a vbulletin board for a company that makes computer programs. this board should have private forums for discussions about the products, the sells, and so on. the manager of the company asked me 2 things :

1- could search engines have acces to the threads that are posted in private forums (like it looks that they have acces to the public ones easely)..
if that's the case, is it possible to protect those threads from being seen by the spiders after all ?

2- how can he be sure that no one could harvest his clients and his resalers email adress both in privates and public forums ?

thx ;)

[Wayne Luke]

1 - No you can completely hide private forums from anyone and anything that doesn't have access to them.

2 - You can set up vBulletin so that it doesn't show email addresses in any place but makes an Email form available for each member.

[WizyWyg]

1) make sure your access masks are turned on and that your user groups are using them.
2) make sure your forum permissions are allowing only the user group you want to see it access to that group
3) spiders can't spider a webpage unless its "fully public". If the forum is private, a search engine spider cannot "spider" it.
4) Use the HIde Email address from the Admin CP to protect your users email addresses. Unless someone is not in the know enough to post their email addy in a post or their sig, that's all yo ucan do to protect them.

[mcahill]

Search engines should also respond to robots.txt which you place in the root of your site to tell them what may and may not be searched. While this is completely outside of Vbulletin, it's another tool that could be used.

There is info on robots.txthttp://www.compumen.com/robots.txt_tutorial.html

Useful if he wants to exclude other stuff...

Mark (not a real expert)

[ventilman]

yeaaaah !

thx yah all ! ;-)

if someone found a security hole in all this, just tell me : i'm about to take a big responsability for such a single newbie in all this ...

:)

[deagledan]

i actually had a similar request, but in reverse. :D

i want to privatize my forums to keep out the lurkers, but i still want the search engines to spider my site so people could find my site/forums and (hopefully) register.

[Zachery]

Thats consider content cloaking and is generally not well recived, in the terms of being revoked.

[SSSlippy]

i actually had a similar request, but in reverse. :D

i want to privatize my forums to keep out the lurkers, but i still want the search engines to spider my site so people could find my site/forums and (hopefully) register.

This will usually get your site removed from a search a engine.

[deagledan]

ah, ok. good thing i asked.

[feldon23]

I am always leery of people saying "turn on access masks" without explaining what it does.

Access Masks allows you to override the Usergroups and Usergroup Permissions on a per-user basis. I think most forums do NOT need this and it is a special case only when there are too many different permissions for too few users to try to do it with Usergroups.

As mentioned, search engines see (or should see) what guests see. But cloaking does happen. I know a popular site that shows stuff to Google that you normally have to pay to see. Fortunately there is browser cloaking too. ;)