I just wanted to know if there was an option to go back to like it was for the last couple of weeks. Where for those of us with larger monitors got a sorta compact bloggish look with the board being a more narrow column down the middle with the empty reddish space on the sides. Edit: Without just making our browsers smaller.
I actually liked that look too on my large monitor. This current look works when I'm browsing with my iPhone or laptop. The more options the better IMHO.
Thanks for continually working on this to try and please as many as possible (I love the new format, get the banner and the wide screen is full). This site or forum or whatever is defintely listening to posters and trying to make this a good spot for Blazer fans. From letting us vote for mods to working on improving "look" while listening to our concerns. Not sure what we did to deserve it . . . but thanks!
Our motto is "for sports fans by sports fans." That means by all of us, as a collaboration. We have the tools here to be democratic about how we do what we do, as staff and as posters. Why not use them?
FYI- You guys might consider working on your search engine optimization a little more. I notice the Description meta tag just says "Rip City", and that should really be a sentence loaded with critical keywords. Similarly, I'd re-write the Title tag to something like "Trail Blazers Forum: Portland Trail Blazers Bulletin Board to Discuss Every Blazer Game, Blazer Trade, Blazer Free Agent Signing, and more. RipCityTwo.com" Right now you guys don't pop up in the top 10 search results for "Trail Blazers Forum" or "Trail blazers bulletin board" or "Blazer free agent signing". Follow this simple advice and you probably will vault to the top 10. There's something of an art form to writing good Title and Description tags. Frontload both with the most critical keywords in the first 3-4 words.
There are SEO modules for vb3, and I think we have one installed but turned off. It's not as simple as you suggest. Keywords are useless anymore. The titles really need to be done per forum and per thread title. I see "Sports Two Forums" and "New Look" in the title of this as I am posting... I see a lot of stuff via google about the SEO modules being security holes...
It actually shouldn't be that tricky. In the forum I manage (run on Simple Machines) you can manage title tags and descriptions within each subforum (ie, within the Blazers). (Obviously, there's no point in attempting to do it per post. Post Title tags are the same thing as the post subject.) I'd be stunned if Vbulletin isn't at least as good as Simple Machines in this regard. It's pretty highly regarded. As for the Keyword meta tag being useless--I don't really bother with it much on my own sites. Google doesn't care about it. However, Yahoo does. It's one of those somewhat debatable points in the SEO world as to whether it's worth the hassle. EVERYBODY agrees, though, that Title metatags and Description metatags are crucial to SEO. If I were looking to boost membership on this site, it's the very first thing I'd work on. It's a relatively small amount of work that users don't really care about (unlike fixed vs dynamic width, for example). And the results can be significant. I own top 5 search results for about a dozen different keyword combinations I've gone after on Google, Yahoo and Bing. One of them took me a year of concerted effort and hiring a staff person to get the #1 ranking. So I know how hard SEO can be. What I'm describing here is nowhere near that difficult.
