Basic issues
Legal & Privacy
Add, remove & manage board
Technical issues
Basic issues
What in the world is BoardTracker?
BoardTracker is a search engine designed specifically for forums and message boards. It indexes only thread related data in a 'smart' way, thus providing more accurate results to searches and a better user experience.
Is BoardTracker good for my board?
Certainly! Not only do we think so also the many board owners whose boards we already indexed would agree. BoardTracker is designed to bring more people closer to the boards, enabling our users to find boards and forums they may otherwise never have heard of, generating more participation in the boards and discussions on those boards. A unique feature of BoardTracker is its near realtime scanning of threads on message boards which ensures people will always find important, relevant and interesting threads in a timely manner - long before traditional search engines ever find such threads - while at the same time BoardTracker is highly optimized for efficient scanning to ensure minimal load and maximum benefit to boards and all users.
Is BoardTracker good for my community and members?
BoardTracker provides tools such as automated alerts to ensure your members never miss a thread that may interest them no matter when or where it is posted. BoardTracker provides more ways for your members to interact with each other and the community as a whole and to get more benefit from their participation in your community by enhancing their ability to find what they need when they want.
Is it worth being in BoardTracker at all?
Yes! BoardTracker's timely and efficent scanning and indexing provides your board with fresh, highly targeted traffic and new members to further grow and enhance your community. BoardTracker constantly strives for new ways to bring more people to the boards and allow them to find information and participate fully.
Is BoardTracker making money off my content?
BoardTracker is a search engine and just like any other search engine we aim to make money too by providing a valuable service to our users while at the same time sending more and more traffic to participating boards. The more successful BoardTracker becomes, the more boards benefit in terms of traffic and new members and enhanced user experience. Everybody wins.
Is BoardTracker taking away my traffic?
BoardTracker generates traffic from many sources and sends traffic TO the boards we index, we don't take traffic from boards. Boards that track referals can see that we send them new, active members and are generally happy about that!
Why isn't BoardTracker like other search engines?
BoardTracker was designed specifically for boards and forums. These are not like 'normal' sites and present particular issues that other search engines ignore or cannot adequately cope with. BoardTracker works in a highly efficient way to index only thread related content, it does not follow every link on a page like a typical search engine spider, it does not repeatedly spider the same pages. BoardTracker simply extracts the precise data required for indexing threads and presents it in a way that best fits this type of data - forum messages.
Is BoardTracker Evil?
BoardTracker is not evil, BoardTracker is cool! :) While we understand that a new type of site and new search technology can at first worry people, this is due simply to lack of familiarity with the concept and some fundamental misunderstandings about what BoardTracker is and how it works. We hope this FAQ will address any such concerns and clarify any issues you may have but if you have further questions you can contact us directly or post in our support forums.
Does BoardTracker have a support forum?
Yes. We just launched our support board which provides forums for users, board owners and developers as well as providing a place where we post articles of interest about boards & boardtracker and blog about related issues.
I have more questions. How do I contact you?
There are a number of ways you can contact us:
 PM: You can contact us using the PM system on our support forums
 Email: You can email us to support@boardtracker.com
Jabber: You can contact us through BoardTracker's Jabber network at BoardTracker@im.boardtracker.com
Why dog? Why blue?
Why not? Actually there are few reasons for that...
Dogs are used for searching, usually for lost people but sometimes for bones, balls and frizbies. Dogs are good at searching, and we believe BoardTracker is too
Dogs are very social. Dogs are communal animals. And dogs are friendly and lovable. (most of them at least, certainly the BoardTracker dog). Boards are also social, communal and lovable (most of them at least). So with Boards and dogs matching in nature, we saw a natural fit. Also, with BoardTracker social network and abilities, we find it an even better theme for our site and mascot.
Why blue? It was simply born that way, and we love it. At least it's not glowing green ;) (*Wonder how it's offspring will look like*)
Legal & Privacy
Is BoardTracker spidering my private forums?
BoardTracker is designed to minimize (if not to totally eliminate) the chance of spidering a private forum on a board.
First, BoardTracker does not add forums that are entirely private (requires a login to view), unless asked to.
Second, BoardTracker does not add forums within a board that are not visible (listed) to guests on the forum's index.
Third, BoardTracker does not have special mod/admin right on any of the boards and therefore has no access to really private forums but only to regular forums.
Fourth, BoardTracker notifies board owners when their board is included in BoardTracker and shows them the list of forums within their board that will be indexed by BoardTracker. This is done well in advance and gives a board owner ample time to contact BoardTracker with a request to remove specific forums from that list.
In the less common case where a board is public in the most part and still lists a private forum to guests though limiting the thread views in that specific forum to all registered members, BoardTracker supplies board owners with very easy tools to exclude those forums from BoardTracker, either with robots.txt, limiting BoardTracker's account for accessing that forum or by contacting support and asking for their exclusion.
Is BoardTracker practicing fair use of my board's data?
We believe it so, to a very high degree...
BoardTracker notifies a board owner in advance about being included in BoardTracker.
BoardTracker only presents a short snippet of a thread, never presents replies of the thread and whenever a thread's snippet is presented it always hyperlinks to the original thread.
BoardTracker supports robots.txt for access control.
BoardTracker is easily accessible to board owners to answer any questions or concerns, through email or the support forum.
BoardTracker supplies board owners with administrative tools to view and manage their board's inclusion in BoardTracker.
Is boardtracker scanning my member profiles?
BoardTracker's scanning mechanism is a specialized system designed for message boards and as such it operates in a unique way.
When threads scanned into BoardTracker are identified to be created by a previously unknown author, BoardTracker attempts to detect the member's username and other basic public profile details such as homepage and posts count in order to properly format the search results.
BoardTracker does not present any contact details even if such exists and only links to the author's profile on the board where it is of course subject to the boards usual access restrictions.
Adding, removing and managing my board's inclusion
Why is my board not in BoardTracker? How do I add it?
First of all to make sure your board is not in BoardTracker, use the "Check if a board exists" tool in the "Control panel" page. Simply put in your domain name into search box and press search.
If your board is indeed not in BoardTracker (yet) it is simply a question of time. However we welcome and encourage you to submit your board for inclusion and to participate in the preparation and categorizing of your forums to expedite the process. Visit our "Add your board" page.
Can I control what BoardTracker spiders from my Board?
Yes. With robots.txt you can exclude specific forums from Boardtracker indexing. And you can always contact us for any help with anything BoardTracker related or otherwise, through Email or the support forums.
My board is already in BoardTracker but I have no control over it. What do I do?
Head over to the board owners' control panel (Make sure you have a BoardTracker account and you are logged in) and claim your board. It is quite simple and explained there in detail. If your board is in BoardTracker, go there and claim your board. Besides further control over your board's inclusion, you will have access to cool statistics and information.
Can I opt-out of BoardTracker?
BoardTracker is robots.txt compliant. You can easily use it to remove your board from BoardTracker. Also you can always email us if you have any questions or concerns.
Shouldn't BoardTracker be opt-in?
Like Yahoo, Google, MSN and others, BoardTracker is a search engine, only that it is specifically targeting message boards. Although none of the other search engines ever bother contacting the sites they spider (a thing that would most certainly cause those search engines to be less effective) BoardTracker responded to valuable feedback from board owners and chose a different approach and so is notifying board owners before their board is added. While this is not a full opt-in approach, it is as close as any search engine ever got to be.
Technical issues
Does BoardTracker use my board's search mechanism or resources to provide search results?
No. BoardTracker is a full and complete search engine. All data detected by BoardTracker is indexed on its servers and only BoardTracker's servers and resources are used in order to generate the search results. This is actually a factor that limits server load on the boards.
Is BoardTracker abusing my server resources? Can it cause server slowdown?
BoardTracker was built with message boards in mind. It is specifically designed to work with those and as such puts great emphesize on doing so effectively and with the minimum board resources used. BoardTracker smartly scans the board rather than aimlessly spidering through the site.
BoardTracker spiders less frequently updated forums less frequently than popular ones, thus causing even less load on the server. BoardTracker does not spider the same page again and again like other search engines.
We believe it is safe to say that BoardTracker is the most efficient mechanism for scanning boards that exists. It is therefore unlikely that BoardTracker is causing your servers to slow down.
But in any case if you suspect that is happening, please do not hesitate and contact us through email or the support forum, so we can check it thoroughly.
Do you provide me with any tools for managing my board's inclusion and participation within BoardTracker?
Board owners are given access to an administrative tool that allows them to view and control the boards and forums that are indexed by BoardTracker as well as the categorization of the board's forums. It also presents the board owners with statistical information regarding their board within BoardTracker and provides additional helpful information regarding BoardTracker and it's activities.
Is BoardTracker robots.txt compliant?
Yes. BoardTracker supports robots.txt and allows full exclusion of your board from BoardTracker as well as partial exclusion of specific forums from being indexed by BoardTracker.
For boards that specifically request addition to BoardTracker, the system takes note of BoardTracker specific directives only.
Is BoardTracker using an account on my board?
You can identify BoardTracker on your board with an account that is usually named BoardTracker. This account is also used by BoardTracker to communicate on the board itself or with the board owners via PMs if needed.
I am a developer. Does BoardTracaker have an API I could use to do funky stuff?
BoardTracker is diligently busy developing APIs and tools for developers to further extend and ehance the reach of boards and their discussions to the public. Such APIs will be described in the soon to be opered development center in BoardTracker.com
Does BoardTracker provide free mods and extra functionality for my board?
BoardTracker is constantly developing new features, some of which are aimed to enhance boards and the board scene in general. BoardTracker released board mods in the past such as Topic Tagging for boards and will continue to work with board owners to supply them with even more tools to enhance and empower their boards.
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