CTS

Somewhere here I was posting my progress from day one. As of now, about half are indexed and about half are pending or ruled not indexed. It has been about 4 months and I am getting click-thru's from search engines now. Bit I have barely worked on backlinks.

I like the xf backend myself. It's seems intuitive and you can make it as simple or complex as you wish. I have used others, but I feel more comfortable with the xf admin console than others.

I think you have to just focus on making your community, community. And try to be the best you can with what you got for the purposes of your forum. But the minute you start looking at other sites as competition, you may start doing things to your site that won't necessarily reflect your sites style. Like a dog chasing his own tail, you find yourself never achieving what you expected for results. Just some thoughts.

I dont have a choice on the XFcloud, but if an add-on is good enough, I don't mind paying the extra. But that's rare.

I leave mine set to the stock setting of 20 minutes.

I have instituted a registration upgrade for new and existing members for the duration of 2025. Normally a member is upgraded upon achieving a certain number of posts. But since the website is relatively new, all new members will be given the upgrade upon registration. Through the end of 2025, all new registrations are automatically upgraded to the Charter Member group. This group will always enjoy the full benefits not normally available to new members, and with lifetime badging that will always display with your username showing that you are a founding member.

I feel that it is important to reflect in your tac that they are visiting a privately-held website. With that, 1st amendment rights are limited to the projected expected decorum of the site exclusively held by the terms of the administrator and supported by the moderators. But a soft touch usually course corrects fairly easily in most cases.

Being considered mere 'equipment' instead of being a person and reading that you "don't have to pay for work" for a concept still only on a napkin,.... well, is kind of a big turn off for any serious staff enthusiest. Especially when your needs are for equipment to build a website that the owner has no interest to monetize.

Everyday I remind myself that everybody hurts about something. Whether I know about it or not.

That article is a worthy resource. Thanks you. But one thing I look for is unmitigated toxicity. Total turn-off for me. #3 & #4 & #5 I need to work on.

I have self hosted before using freeware and buyware. But for me, the money value of time saved is important. I use XFcloud services, which can be considered pretty spendy on a monthly bases. But I no longer have server-side duties as well as wondering if I have it set up efficiently and safely, I no longer have to do updates except if a template edit needs addressing, and basically am just left with back of house duties for the forum as well as being in the front of house for guests. May not work well for everyone, but I do have to balance time with life.

Had to translate.

I do not mind standard AI searches from the large search engines. They don't send out AI scrapers. They already know your content by means of indexing. And their AI insights are typically alongside their SERPs AI scrapers usually only scrape-to-teach. Oh sure they announce maybe a search engine in the future. But that's not my point. My point is they aren't giving search results alongside, just only their 'insights' as if it was theirs, with zero attribution. So I don't like them patronizing my site.

Finally got my call sign issued today. (no need to publish it, I only have handhelds atm) Next test date end of April, gonna focus on the general, and extra if I have the time.

My latest site is very new. Months. On that I feel leaders should be the brunt of the posts and should be available to all members. After your membership begins to grow, and subsequent threads and posts become predominantly by the membership, leaders posts become less and less as the members post amongst themselves . There may be a pivitol time where the need to respond as a leader becomes more of a want.

I figured out a while back that almost every price is negotiable. Walmart, hotels and motels, of course cars, etc. It's not that I'm a cheap bastard. Maybe. But if I see opportunity, I try for it. It's a practiced skill. But some things I know i need bad enough then the price is the price.

None of them. And Hitler should be on that list.

Absolutely

We have to remember, being a staff member is a responsibility. And the senior staff has to remember that staff (typically) are giving a part of their life for no pay to further and support YOUR website. Its a balancing act, but I would offer staff an easy out if some life is needed to be taken back. You can always re-hire when they are more available. I mean, short of something bad happening, you did want them in the first place. So that shouldn't be an issue.

The rulings now suggest if you are in the database you can talk, but if you are waiting like me, you have to wait to get entered and pay the $35 to get the download link for your cert and number as it isnt assigned until the FCC is done on their end. (my understanding). My test was at the Sheriffs department . Thank you all for the congrats. I really enjoy testing myself on whatever. And this felt like success.

Well my site is too new to come up with those metrics. In my post I was referencing a, well, experimental period where I thought I could tweak it up a bit. In my efforts I lost many listings due to duplicate content as well as poor meta keywords and a few other great ideas I had. Right now I have reasonable success getting most all my pages properly indexed. Mainly because I haven't been dinking around where I am not as skilled.

Today I completed and passed the FCC Technician Amateur radio certification licensing. In about a week I will have legal access to listen and transmit when the FCC enters it into the database. (the final step). I was pretty nervous, but actually it was a breeze for me. I will be studying the General (and hopefully the Extra) licensing requirements and to prepare for the next round sometime in the next few months. There was at least 50 people in for different test levels, and I estimate about 2/3 of them passed. (and I never saw so many grey hairs gathered in one place before lol)

I do block them. Common ones at robots.txt and then I applied Cloudflare to block their known AI bots at the zone level. I consider them non-attributing content scrapers. edit to add: That's why they call it "Training" for the AI. It uses your stuff to train itself to "know it".

I surf every website in my genre' to see how they do things and learn a bit about their history. I do not ever steal content nor do I criticize their operation. But along with the many forums I visit, in or out of genre', it is to get a look and feel of their sites to mentally compare to my efforts.