BoardTracker?

[Phrost]

I've got a very active VBulletin based portal/forum. Today I noticed a user had registered as BoardTracker, with the homepage of www.boardtracker.com. This is apparently a meta-forum that indexes posts from different webforums all over the internet.

The thing that I can't get my head around is whether or not this is a good thing to have my site be featured on. As my site doesn't require registration to view, I guess banning the account wouldn't accomplish much. But I do have a set of pay-for-access forums that I would not want indexed on this service if the operator decided to upgrade the bot account.

So does anyone know the pros/cons of this? Should I shut off access to their spider/whatever they're using to crawl/index the threads on my forums, or should I see this as an opportunity to have traffic increased to my site?

[James]

Well, if you've got forums that you 'force' people to pay for, wouldn't that mean that the spider can't gain access to those sections?
If not, then I'd say that you could probably ban it (and should probably ban all spiders) from viewing each of the seperate forums. I should think something like the following will do the trick:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forums/forumdisplay.php?f=24

[Chris]

Assuming they obey robots.txt

[Westech]

Hey Phrost. I just want to mention that I love your forum and have spent quite a bit of time there over the years.

After a quick look, it appears to me that boardtracker is really only a kind of search engine for forums. It looks like they show the user search results and then the user still has to click through to your site to view the actual thread. Assuming that they don't show caches of the entire contents of your pages to your users I would think that this would drive more traffic to your site and help it rather than hurt it.

As for the pay-for-access forums, I would just make sure that you explicitly state in your terms of service that paid members may not make paid content available to anyone else. It's also probably a good idea not to let the boardtracker member/bot buy a paid membership...