There appears to be something wrong with the site search, results mostly don't include titles and the brief snippets. E.g. Searching for "Google" brings back results like: "Untitled http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=53769". Perhaps this is due to Google's visit and the subsequent load on the machine?

The cvs repository suggests that there isn't a robots.txt for OpenACS.org in CVS. I plan to exclude Google from attempting to post messages and log-on on my site using robots.txt (by barring robots from /forum/message-post and /register). I'm sure a few of us would be interested in any subsequent alterations to the robots.txt to exclude various dynamic parts of the site from Google's gaze.

For those unaware, Google is doing a "deep crawl".

Eventually, listing the highest-hit individual posts as part of the thread hit listing would be ideal, but even without that, just returning the thread hit in search looks like a big improvement. Thank you, Tilmann and Dave!

Hm, in Forums, although each individual post always has its own message_id, Forums gives a link to display just that one post (and its direct replies) only if the poster assigned a different subject line, rather than accepting the default subject. That's kind of disconcerting. Occasionally you want to give a link to an individual post, so there should be a (small, unobtrusive) link on each post for displaying just that post.

It'd also be very nice to have <a name="message_id_foo"></a> anchors embedded in the page too, so you could display the entire thread but zooming in on a particular post. The UI decision of whether to make display using those name tags the default behavior for viewing a single post could (and should) be postponed to a later date, just sticking the name tags into the Forums HTML hurts nothing and would definitely be worthwhile.

Simple Matters of Programming, I guess. I'm sure others have thought of this too, just figured I'd point it out anyway...