I'm working on a new BBS architecture, this time paying careful attention to how it has to work to be friendly to search engine spiders. Examination of the current design shows that it isn't very accommodating to search engines, and allows older posts to become inaccessible to them after enough time elapses. It seems that old threads that get resurrected are often being kept alive in the search engines by external links, rather than the links discovered by a spider coming in the front door.

Making the Zone friendlier to search engines is somewhat controversial, though, because sometimes people would rather let their words sink into obscurity. The flip side of designing for search engines is that I can also shut off search engine access more reliably, and rely on a hypothetical local search engine accessible only to Zoners.

Stay tuned. Within a couple of weeks I'll post a link to a new site using the prototype new BBS software. I decided this time around not to experiment on the Zone first, because the new architecture requires changing file formats and other aspects of the system, and I don't want to take chances with a system that now has over 300,000 messages in it. When the new system is stable, then I'll copy the huge Zone message base into it and install it here.