Just saw this when trying to reply to a post in the Adelaide forum. It's not like I swamp this section with 50 frivolous posts a day. I am using mobile data though Vodafone due to the broadband at my end not working.

I dont know the cause of this message but I do know that we are currently being swamped by Spammers - over 100 joined in the last 48 hours.

It would be nice if the quote feature automatically included a url so one could see which post the quote was taken from.

That would have helped me find the 3 month old post that was being posted rather than having to do a search for it. For some reason I decided to use Google to search for it rather than using the internal facility which did a much better job though it did ask me to limit the number of words in my search string.

Now neither Google or the forum software is doing anything wrong but the forum software could help Google do a better job and reduce load from robots at the same time.

For the search in question. Google returns one result. Fair enough, it has not yet indexed the new page quoting the old text and displays the following message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

On repeating the search it gives me 8 results all of which reference the same page using different URLs. Each URL google has picked has different values for the "p=" parameter of the url apart from one which has no p parameter and has "f=" and "start=" parameters instead. Google only displays either the http://www.busaustralia.com or busaustralia.com version of the URL with a 5 to 3 bias for the www version in this case.

I don't know if Google considers pages with different URLs to be different or there is some other subtle difference with these pages but it would seem to me that people searching via search engines would prefer identical pages to be eliminated from there results but regardless of whether Google's behaviour is adequate - for my purposes the pages are identical not just "very similar", the forum would be under less load from robots if it can force them down paths where identical pages have a unique URL. Whirlpool for example only permits robots to access the archive view of a thread which returns the whole thread as a single page. Personally, I don't like that view but no doubt its very efficient for bulk access.

Please forward my remarks to phpBB if there is nothing can be done locally.