Make use of forumrules area

Time to perform: 2Mins or less
Ease of use: Piece of cake (if i can do it, so can you)
Function: Makes use of wasted horizontal space at the bottom of thread & forum pages.


Hi all

This is my first release of anything that mildly implies a hack.

Anyway, here is what it does:

The standard 'forumrules' box is fairly small and wastes a lot of horizontal space that could be used in another way, for example ads or links - or both.
See attachments for the changes it makes to your threads & forum pages (not index).

Hopefully, as my first ever release, this will find itself of use to the community here. I've used many hacks from various folk and this is my little bit back to the community that I've taken from! I really hope those who use it find it enjoyable, useful and most importantly, easy to perform.

I've had this change performed (on my test & live forum) and it seems to work fine. It was also working well with vb3.5.4 but I'm now running 3.6 so hence it is released for 3.6 GOLD.

Just download the attached *.txt file and follow the instructions.

Many folks may consider the 'forum rules' section to be a less viewed area of their board. This may be true, but for those ads which pay per view, rather than per click, this is an ideal means of including an extra ad or two without burdening your viewers and forcing them to view.

*HINT: When adding content to the cells, try to avoid using terms which may lead to issues where SEO is concerned. Too many references to 'links' might have an adverse impact. Instead, opt for other choices such as 'friends sites', 'miscellaneous' and 'reciprocal sites'

Please click the 'install' button if you've made use of this little gadget

ps - all comments welcome (especially good ones :nervous
pps- Please remember, this is my first effort at a hack - so be gentle

*Hint comes with gratitude to alkatraz for the SEO notes.

[karlm]

-reserved post-

[alkatraz]

Great to see you making use of that space!

Side note: From an SEO standpoint, having the word "links" apear a bunch of times at the bottom of every page is a very bad idea. If you were to retitle the areas to say "Sponsors" | "Friends" | "Blogs" you could easily avoid this potential search engine filter.

[karlm]

Thank you kindly for the advice. I very much appreciate the input. I hadn't even given it a thought from an SEO potential.
I'll amend the above post to reflect your input, however, I left the actual content upto each user to add accordingly. This way they can put whatever they want into the titles and the content cells.
Thanks again.

[MentaL]

not a good area for adverts.

[karlm]

Agreed, MentaL, but i've left the content open for users to put whatever they want in it. As the images reflect, mine uses one google ad, one ad-link, recipricol links & blog links. I guess folks could put images in there, perhaps embed a media track of some description etc. The main concept was to make use of wasted space - which it does

[^SuiCyde^]

looks good man, i've put this to use on my forums

[karlm]

^suiCyde^,
thanks - i signed up to have a gander, looks well implemented and I saw by keeping it shorter, you managed to retain enough space to keep the forum-jump menu too. Nice work.

[adwade]

Originally Posted by karlm

...for those ads which pay per view, rather than per click, this is an ideal means of including an extra ad or two without burdening your viewers and forcing them to view.

BRILLIANT Idea! And perfect implementation too.

[mrkhm]

thanks, works magnificently, for those in vb 3.6.4, although this hack is cool in column format, i wanted just one title tag e.g. Sponsors, with a cell that spanned the rest of the page rather than having mutliple columns, to do this, at the very top of the forumrules template, change the table width from "180" to 100% and specify the width of your spnsor cell when you paste it as directed in the instructions e.g. change "<td class="thead">title one</td>" (copied from instructions) to "<td class="thead" width="560">title one</td>" (for full page span) you won't need to copy anymore cells. after that. hope taht all makes some sort of sense.

Nice hack!!!!!

*installed