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Plugin: lotsolinks

  • Hello!

    I’ve been working on my first plugin for a while, and I don’t even know if it’s useful! It deals with users with websites to promote for fun or for profit. The concept is this: users can specify tags in their profiles possibly related to their website. Then, in the topics they start, everytime another user use one of those words in their posts inside the topic, these words are wrapped in a link to the topic poster’s website.

    Am I clear? Now you too can have annoying intellitxt’s on your forums =) without the thousands of visitors! And you’re not referring to big advertising companies but to your dudes with a web presence. It is a give and take thing. Cause you might raise their pagerank like this, but they have to come to your site and post good topics and take care the discussion goes along etc. It might even be a socializing exercise in tricking the posters to type the tags you’ve specified! Cause they are not visible to the public.

    And here comes the reality check part. I’ve been just “hacking around ” with this thing and I’m aware things should look prittier than they are now. First things first, it requires the ra_custom_profile_keys plugin as an easy way to add a field in the registration. Which is not a so bad thing after all. Good plugin. But more importantly I needed a way to hide the tags field in the profile view and I only managed to do it by modifying one of the template-functions, which I know is absolutely an ugly thing to do, even if I just added a line.

    It’s all in the code

    and you can see it in function here. (I was hunting for a marketable domain name, sue me).

    Btw, if you happen to try it out and things go wrong… I really hope I could help you about it but don’t hold your breath.

    Ciao

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Am I bozo at my third post or is it just plain uninteresting? Feedback anyone?

    My first idea was to get the tags from the metatag “keywords” of the page submitted, but I couldn’t get around my hoster denying the use of fopen or readfile.

    It’s an interesting concept. I can’t see it working personally or understand why you’d want it … but it could lead to some interesting behaviour :P It seems almost game-esque to me.

    I don’t understand why you didn’t use the bb_topics, bb_tagged and bb_tags tables in unison. Surely you could look up what topic had which tags that way? Or did I misunderstand something?

    Best of all still is bigbreastsforum.com :D :D

    Well yes, it’s not exactly “serious” or “poetic”…

    I don’t understand what you mean by using those tables. Watch out, calling them tags might have been misleading from me. Maybe keywords was better, cause they are supposed to be related to the content of the user’s website.

    It’s all about traffic. What the topic poster might get is one more link back to his site. The price to pay is to post topics on your board… Now I see that this might lead to topics just about his website content…

    I dunno, maybe it was too late at night for me that night :P It was the intellitxt concept that inspired me.

    I don’t mean that in a bad way :P It’s just a new concept to me.

    Fair ’nuff.

    Yup. It’d be interesting to see how it turns out.

    The later at night, the more interesting the idea :P

    Yes I understand now, and your observation makes very much sense. I’m just not much into the structure of bbpress. That’s why I wanted feedback :)

    It would change the plugin, but triggering this substitution by the tags of a topic instead of the website’s content translates into: “make good topics not exclusively about your website AND choose good tags for what you’re posting and you’ll get links back”. Will work into that direction =)


    citizenkeith
    Participant

    @citizenkeith

    This would be really interesting if you were able to link those keywords (not tags! :D ) back to a specific page on the user’s website… not just the front page or whatever page they put in there. That way it would link to something relevant about the keyword.

    How about making the link be to a Google search of that website for that particular keyword? For example, if I defined “ludwig” as one of my keywords, the plugin would link to a Google search of my website, citizenkeith.com:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acitizenkeith.com+ludwig

    Make sense? I think this would be much more useful and interesting for the users.

    Thanks for the brainstorming!

    Exactly, something relevant to the keyword. Cause as things are now, they give ways to ‘cheat’ somehow, and for example put in very common keywords. This would be partially avoidable by blacklisting articles and stuff like that maybe. I think it would be cool to read the page they wanna promote and get the keywords from the meta-tag “keywords” in that page. Just cause it is less comfortable to change those just for a forum, I hope people have more interesting things to do :P Furthermore they would be supposed to be relevant to the content.

    But this introduces other complications… As far as I know this would imply the use of function calls like get_file_contents and stuff, that many hosters deny for not local files. There is a way to get around this by using the curl libraries (?), but will they be installed on the hoster?

    Your idea is cool cause it basically resolves the problem! The only flaw I see is this would improve the pagerank of GOOGLE and not of the poster’s website. Cause I was in a ‘business stuff’ mood… :P Yeah, it would raise the visit counts. And in a trend of helping the spread of informations sounds like a plan. If I’ve seen right, it would definitely be more ‘forum users’ oriented than ‘topic poster’ oriented.

    Let’s not forget what fel64 said… cause if this system is based on the keywords (not tags) I still tend to think it would spoil the content of the topic itself. While if all is shifted to the tags of the topic, the magic happens (links from google, whatever) if the topic is well formatted (good tags etc.)

    But it’s early in the morning again, sorry.


    bbolman
    Participant

    @bbolman

    Hello,

    just a shot in the dark, you never know. Anyone from that period happen to still have a copy of this snippet of plugin of mine handy to pass it to me?


    pagal
    Participant

    @pagal

    link broken

    where can i download this plugin?

    I would like to know myself. See my previous post.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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