If you are looking for a teaching job in the Philippines, you should probably head to the Jobs for Teachers sub-forum of the Education in the Philippines Forum at http://eduphil.org/, or go to the more specialized Teaching Jobs Search Forums at http://educjobs.net - I administer the former, while the latter is administered by my co-teacher at PAREF Springdale School, Mr. Archie Sacay.
The problem with this kind of forums is the fact that most users would go there, get some information (specifically, jobs available and contact information of the schools) and then leave, leaving nothing to the forum administrator(s) who spent resources compiling the information. The obvious remedy would be to disable guest access, and force users to register and activate an account before allowing them access to the information. The problem with this approach is that the information that you would not like unauthenticated users to see could not be seen by Google either. So your site does not get indexed, and you do not get visitors. (The alternative technique of cloaking, that is, providing different content to GoogleBot when it visits the site, and the register-first-to-access-info if a human visitor does the same, is admittedly black hat, and frowned upon by many webmasters, although I know that many are using that technique. If you are caught doing this, Google could potentially exclude you from their index.)
So what's the solution? My idea is simple: hide some of the information. That is, if a guest accesses the page (and by guests, we would include GoogleBot), he will only see some of the information, perhaps the job openings, and the school (at the very least that is what I implement at EduPhil). But we hide some of the information, say the contact information of the school. Of course, if one already knows the school, it should be easy to get the contact information online, as long as the school has a website or some information about it online. Otherwise one will have a problem. And if the administrator would really like to be cruel (I don't want to), he could leave out the name of the school, and include it in the hidden information. Still further ideas would be to limit the information seen by number of posts, time spent on the forum, etc. but as of now that is beyond my programming skills :-)
Anyway, to implement this in MyBB (which is the forum software used at EduPhil), one would need to create a plugin. I based my code on Dragon Fever's Hide Links from Guests plugin but unfortunately the license of that plugin states that I cannot offer a modified version of the plugin for download. Just a hint how to do it: the preg_replace at the end of the file will be replaced with a preg_replace for a given block of HTML that you want to hide. In my case, I would put the information to be hidden in a block of HTML inside (for an example, look at the source of this page). If the user is a guest, unactivated member, or banned member, the hidden information will be replaced with some other text.
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Labels: forum, increasing forum participation, job forums, mybb
The problem with this kind of forums is the fact that most users would go there, get some information (specifically, jobs available and contact information of the schools) and then leave, leaving nothing to the forum administrator(s) who spent resources compiling the information. The obvious remedy would be to disable guest access, and force users to register and activate an account before allowing them access to the information. The problem with this approach is that the information that you would not like unauthenticated users to see could not be seen by Google either. So your site does not get indexed, and you do not get visitors. (The alternative technique of cloaking, that is, providing different content to GoogleBot when it visits the site, and the register-first-to-access-info if a human visitor does the same, is admittedly black hat, and frowned upon by many webmasters, although I know that many are using that technique. If you are caught doing this, Google could potentially exclude you from their index.)
So what's the solution? My idea is simple: hide some of the information. That is, if a guest accesses the page (and by guests, we would include GoogleBot), he will only see some of the information, perhaps the job openings, and the school (at the very least that is what I implement at EduPhil). But we hide some of the information, say the contact information of the school. Of course, if one already knows the school, it should be easy to get the contact information online, as long as the school has a website or some information about it online. Otherwise one will have a problem. And if the administrator would really like to be cruel (I don't want to), he could leave out the name of the school, and include it in the hidden information. Still further ideas would be to limit the information seen by number of posts, time spent on the forum, etc. but as of now that is beyond my programming skills :-)
Anyway, to implement this in MyBB (which is the forum software used at EduPhil), one would need to create a plugin. I based my code on Dragon Fever's Hide Links from Guests plugin but unfortunately the license of that plugin states that I cannot offer a modified version of the plugin for download. Just a hint how to do it: the preg_replace at the end of the file will be replaced with a preg_replace for a given block of HTML that you want to hide. In my case, I would put the information to be hidden in a block of HTML inside (for an example, look at the source of this page). If the user is a guest, unactivated member, or banned member, the hidden information will be replaced with some other text.
Like this post? Please help me pay for my Internet access.
Labels: forum, increasing forum participation, job forums, mybb
