i chopped that h1... I use only one per page, stay light on h2's, and tag h3's with some idea that they'll describe better what the user should expect...
Which is great. (It's also a step that wasn't explained previously, whereupon if the OP had followed it, would have broken their setup worse.) But it's also more meaningful in that 1) you're tagging content for *users*, 2) it's better for accessibility e.g. screen readers and 3) you're focusing on making something for your users which inevitably means a focus on producing something they care about, which is an investment in the future of your forum.
This is part of the problem, though - it's not just about recognising a trait and acting on it, it's the very strange faulty pattern recognition that people misattribute to things. If someone spends a lot of time on their forum, making content, engaging with people (and also encouraging them to engage), and also tweaking the tags, which one of these is most likely to actually produce results, and which one is attributed to producing results? That's what I'm getting at - all of these things help, but people think twiddling tags produces more results than having something that brings people to the site and gets them to engage, link back, share on social media etc. and because they see the tag twiddling as 'a thing they did' (in a way that writing content is somehow rationalised as not a thing they actively did), they ascribe better engagement to it.
And no, we don't know what combination of things helped. Google doesn't tell us what they use to identify the relevancy and authority of a site. We know that historically backlinks were important, we know that outbound links are important too because Google has told us this. Google has also repeatedly told us, build for users, not for search engines. Twiddling tags tends to fall into the latter not the former. Tweaking the hx tags *can* improve it but in very specific ways that on their own may not do a fat lot.
Is h1 important? Sure. Is it the most important thing? Questionable - and historically the advice from the likes of Google was to use the h1 to be the site name. They haven't given us better advice since so whatever we're doing is somewhat guesswork - tempered by the fact that we're really not doing it in isolation. So you'll post content, you'll share on social media and you'll adjust the tags but you have no way to reliably know which has the real impact.
there is more than evidence that engines use h1's as a title expectation... h2's as important information expectations.. h3's and descending as further explanation of the hierarchy tags. i don't think that was intended when the tags were introduced way back when- they were simply a means to present. however, they're well suited for what the engines are doing with them.
They were never simply a means to present. The ML in HTML literally means 'markup language', i.e. add meta information to a document to describe the document better. The h tags were always intended as structural markers in a document and we've moved on as HTML is no longer a document markup language but a swirling dense soup of tags that don't mean a lot that somehow results in something we can loosely refer to as an application.
In the spec there was always a huge amount of talk, often very misunderstood, about presentation/stylistic elements vs structural elements. The use of i vs em isn't 'i is shorter and they both do italics' because while stylistically they might do that in a number of browsers, they *mean* different things, and to people who use screenreaders and other assistive technologies, it's a whole different world to understand - I'm only just getting my head around it after watching years of dogma be blown away by actually watching a guy with a screenreader use it and watch how it helps him do what he does.
To say that they're only for engines is a misnomer, because they're not. They're all sorts of things - so getting it right is important. I'm still trying to figure that out, but I'm consciously not trying to suggest how the SMF project should adapt - I am, however, interested in what works for all sorts of different use cases and trying to understand why so I can do it better in future. And then toe the party line here... long story.
i don't question the expertise of the board elders, here- that would be folly...
There are times it is appropriate, and there are times it is not. And there are times when accepted doctrine is wrong and new doctrine can be right but it is complicated. For my part I was posting while multitasking and I generally don't engage too well with people who assert that they want to do something in a certain way that has problems.
The other part of questioning the elders, so to speak, is that in any environment you're going against an amount of inertia and stubbornness (elders do not get that way without themselves being stubborn and full of inertia to get that way), and what would be normally described as anecdata isn't usually enough to argue with that kind of inertia. Hell, even documented evidence with scientific rigour is usually not enough because inertia is hard to deal with.
And is it ego driven? For sure. But consider the reverse situation - if I came on to your site and started arguing with you about the way your football team plays and going against the current understood wisdom, the odds are I'd be reacting the way you are now. (Not saying I would; I have no interest in American football, let alone enough to build up a position whereby I'd feel sufficiently knowledgeable to believe I could argue against current received wisdom)
People who get entrenched as the local subject matter expert inevitably get some ego trip out of it, desired or otherwise, just by nature of the 'job' so to speak. It takes a certain amount of ego to get to that point in the first place, to become knowledgeable enough to be comfortable offering oneself up as any kind of authority. (It amused me no end during the early 2000s with the amount of webmaster forums that were set up by people who had made a site in GeoCities and that apparently qualified them to be an authority on making a site.)
the dynamic 'the mean one' presents is the cause for message boards to be dying anyway- where some prick squats on a board and runs everyone off. for that bully to be in a position of authority on a webpage that makes forum software is... ironic?
Yes, and no. Again we're back to that slightly weird faulty causation observance. You're right - but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
Problem 1: People who post a few lines tend to post from mobile, in between other things, not really giving it much time and/or thought. Posts from mobile are usually more blunt than strictly necessary as they're a diversion from 101 other demands on our time at any given time. Hell, I'm just as guilty, I post in between waiting for my work PC to do things. (Though I'm posting from iPad, it's slightly less painful than typing on a phone. But not a lot. And the interruption nature means I am more blunt than maybe I should be.)
Problem 2: A holistically adopted conservative attitude. No, I don't mean any political position, but simply one about preserving the way we are. Kindred will, on most provocations, point out how long he's been doing this. This is an interesting double edged sword. On the one hand, he was there before forums were forums. He's got decades of observing people discussing online - and while it has changed, people are still people, and there's still the average a-hole quotient inside any given population. But that also shrouds him from necessarily observing changes; why change if people are habitually the same as ever? The same mentality extends throughout this forum, that how we've always done it is how we should always do it because that's how we've always done it. (It's mostly this reason that I left being an active member of the dev team in 2014. Little has, as far as I can see, changed. The names change, the mindset stays the same.)
Problem 3: Power corrupts. Becoming any kind of subject matter expert in a field, even a mediocre low-level one, changes you. SMEs tend to present opinion as fact and defend it as such, which is pure breeding grounds for tempers and strawman arguments. I'm guilty of it too but I can usually back up what I'm saying with more than just fluff.
Problem 4: Perceived entitlement culture. There is an interesting tendency growing for the "I reject your reality and substitute my own". There has been a strong vibe in this community for a number of years that what users want, users should get. Users must have the freedom to indulge. Unfortunately, when someone who does know better comes in and explains why things are bad ideas, it's drowned out in a well-intentioned display of 'ignore them, you can do this anyway, here's how', often to the greater detriment of all concerned over time. The elders, such as they are, tend to shut this down to get out ahead of it, knowing it can't go anywhere good.
Does all that legitimise the perceived flaws in Kindred's style? No. But it helps us understand better why things are so and why people react the way they do. That alone is, for me, worth the price of admission. All these combined are what is killing forums - a reluctance to move forward, a reluctance to adopt to changes because the changes infer other changes that aren't perceived positively and to the detriment of the whole, and those that stand defending the old ways become grumpy old people who resent those trying to move them on in favour of "new thinking" that usually hasn't gotten its fill of wisdom from the old thinking yet.
just because somebody offers a little twist doesn't detract from your product.... these tags in question are highly valued by google and other engines. i don't know if they were when you guys set out with 2.0RC1 or not, but they are now.
No one is questioning that they are valued. The only debate in my mind is whether the correct amount of importance is placed on them, and that part is impossible to know because people don't ascribe correct value to things.
Let me give you an example. I've routinely heard it said that paid forum software makes better forums. Better tools apparently make all the difference. But what gets missed is the fact that someone just shelled out $150+ for a forum software for a site, you can pretty safely bet they're going to put a lot more time and energy in to that site than they ever would if they got it for free. Does that mean that free forums always get beaten by paid entries? Of course not, there is a complete spectrum in all directions. But there is a huge feeling that paid platforms succeed more because they're paid - and never because owners have a tendency towards trying to stomach the sunk cost of putting $150 or more down to get the site going, and that huge feeling is frequently missed by bystanders who only see 'oh that site is using XenForo rather than <insert free software here>'. Same deal historically with vBulletin.
If you have a barrier to entry, you're probably more likely to make that investment pay off for you. But that somehow often gets overlooked because people don't realise they're investing their time and energy to pay off that sunk cost, and people just see a correlation that isn't really there, because it's a completely different correlation.
they wouldn't dare speak to me like that in person. carrying the weight of an elder and thinking calling themselves 'mean one' somehow excuses that behavior is a good way to drive potential users away... and all for----- ego. friggin' ego.
I dunno about that. I'm definitely an elder in the various groups I'm a part of and invariably the issue I have is that people don't want to ask me questions because they think they're taking too much of my time up. At least, so I've been told by the other people in such groups.
