[Solved] Other Forum/Google

[paulslocum]

I just wanted to point out that for me, that top Google hit for "openoffice forum" is this site: http://www.oooforum.org/. If you type in "openoffice.org forum" you get this one, but I'm guessing a lot of users don't realize that that is the full name of the software, and I assumed that "openoffice" would suffice as a search term.

I just wasted a lot of time posting on those forums thinking they were the official OpenOffice.org forums. There's nothing there to indicate that it's an unofficial forum, and the forums are not very active or helpful. I was starting to think OpenOffice.org had a lot fewer users than I had previously believed.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but I'm guessing other people may be having the same experience as me, and that's a problem. I also posted on the other site's "Site Feedback" forum about this. Personally I think the other forum should be closed and redirect people here. But I guess the second-best thing would at least be to somehow get this forum to beat the other site on Google for common keyword searches.

[Villeroy]

There is nothing "official" in neither one. There are mailing lists with a more "official" character since many of the mailing lists are visited by contributors and much of the "high level information exchange" is done on the lists.
oooforum.org was the most important English web-forum until late 2007 when a group of active members decided for a new forum due to administration deficiencies. This new forum is hosted on a Sun-server in the city of Hamburg (Germany) but it delivers 100% user-generated content. There are almost no developers lurking around here.
Only the site-owner can shut down oooforum.org. it is still a huge resource of information, particularly for macro-coders since the "pioneers" solved all the fundamental problems of OOo-coding during the first years 2003-2005.
Some of this forum's active contributors, including me, still visit oooforum.org on a regular base. I do not anser that many questions in depth over there.
Regarding Google, nobody can influence the page-ranking without paying for it. The more a site is linked, the higher the page rank.

[paulslocum]

I'm not saying the old site should go away, I just think it should be closed to new posts because it's really not very useful anymore from my experience. And it's diluting the community. The OpenOffice main site's help section implies that this is the official forum and the other one is "unofficial". By "official", I mean the one that the OpenOffice.org website recommends. I understand that there aren't necessarily any developers or "employees" here. What would really kill off the old site is if the official OpenOffice.org help page removed the link.

re: Google, I just thought that some meta tag adjustments might help a little, although I see "openoffice" without the ".org" in your tags multiple times, so maybe nothing can be done. Well, I'll post a link to this site at least. ;o)

[TerryE]

Google has got very sophisticated algos to neutralise the traditional HTML header based mechanisms for hoisting ratings. OOoForum has the advantage that it has been going for 3 times longer than the usOOo forums, so has a greater depth of links. It is somewhat creaking, but still provides a useful service, even though this usOOo English forum has now overtaken it in posting and transactional volumes.

You have to remember that Google is a profit making business. It's business model is just based on making the service providers and advertisers pay rather than the end-users. This is why when you search for Openoffice, you also get sponsored links to some very dubious companies which will charge you $30 or so for support on free software (even though this support is usually to redirect such scammed consumers to this site). Whilst many would view what they are doing as immoral, it isn't technically illegal. They can afford to pay Google to get top billing. We offer a free service so we can't.

We also can't tell OOoForum to shut down.