Flarum SEO is worst and i still want to use it

[Hari]

Well i liked the theme and fluid user experience but really how can they miss simple basic things like meta description

For every small SEO issue i had to beg in the community

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/28602-fix-meta-description-seo-issue-solved

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/27092-blomstra-meta-an-open-graph-and-schemaorg-extension-with-cards/49

My recent heart braking incident is they are using a category description as every discussion description. When i expressed saying this not correct and the first post first 30 characters need to be the discussion meta description they said it’s coming from core suggested to opt for a premium extension .

I lose my mind why does Dev’s senior project mangers do not understand and build SEO friendly sites? If they can use tags description why they can’t use first post description for the discussion page.

Ofcourse they are not kids , when you have plenty of knowledge don’t you guys recognise how you are misleading the spider.

Oh god where should I go and cry for choosing flarum.

When i point them them things they don’t consider adding them

When i express my frustration they calls me rude behaviour. It’s like take the bullet and put a smiley face otherwise we will consider you as rude person.

@Hari things like these are really damaging my mental health. To save my self i had to sponsor extensions i will stop using flarum in next few months.

Since i am using few custom flarum extensions i am stuck with it.

But for sure the pressure will take me back to wordpress

And there is a old qoute “you can explain any thing to a person but not to the idiots”

All the education is worthless if you can not understand the needs of your customers (users)

Flarum is a gold digger, i mean the whole eco system.

Sorry about posting my flarum experience here i have no friends who can understand this.

[phenomlab]

@Hari no problems. I hear you - totally. I’m not going to turn this into a Flarum bashing exercise, but I landed up with almost the same experience when I raised similar concerns around there not being any suitable GDPR extensions - yet Blomstra is based in Europe, and that’s the same region as to where they are marketing the “commercial” version of Flarum.

I received something of a backlash when I made the point around Flarum not being GDPR ready or compliant. I’m an information technology and security expert by trade and yet some other members suddenly decided they were experts in the subject matter, and decided to refute my claims by posting links to pointless websites that also had very little idea of what an adequate GDPR framework should look like. In fact, the tone of the discussion deteriorated to the point where my views were almost being discredited - in other words, quite toxic, and not something i wanted to be a part of anymore.

Getting back to the SEO side of things, I’ve never considered this to be adequate in Flarum. It’s written and developed by someone with no real fundamental understanding of SEO best practices. If you compare to NodeBB (who absolutely do this properly and it’s part of core) you’ll find you in fact are missing out on traffic when it needn’t be that way. My traffic stats have gone though the roof since moving to NodeBB, and I’m not doing anything differently either.

I used Flarum for two projects - both of which failed in terms of traction. Sudonix (as you know) is based on NodeBB, and there really is no comparison between the two platforms.

Flarum is a gold digger, i mean the whole eco system.

Totally agree, and it’ll only get worse once Blomstra takes hold.

[qwinter]

@phenomlab How is SEO for nodebb? (ideally without plugins because maintaining a nodebb install with plugins is hell it seems)

[phenomlab]

@qwinter It works 100% effectively. They seem to have nailed the process and I don’t need to use any fancy extensions or plugins to make it work. I just follow best practice.

Here’s a sample of a random website SEO audit. Without any effort, I’m still getting Grade B - based on the fact that all of the content (with the exception of articles I write directly) is member generated and I won’t be amending titles to ensure they fit into 70 characters minimum anytime soon

Grade F for links - again, I’m not bothered, but there are plugins that will take care of this aspect - you could even do it with simple jQuery. Again F for social - I’m not bothered by this at all.

[Hari]

@phenomlab i miss Alexa full site SEO audits. Amazon killed that service

[phenomlab]

@Hari Yes, I know… Sad, but true.

[Hari]

Today i have updated to flarum v1.3 and noticed they fixed the meta description issue in the core

<meta name=“description” content=“”>

i am really shocked, did I cry last night for an already fixed bug

[phenomlab]

@Hari said in Flarum SEO is worst and i still want to use it :

did I cry last night for an already fixed bug

You’ll be doing it again soon when you realize something else is missing and you’ll have to pay for an extension to fix it…

[Hari]

@phenomlab true, I just disabled the SEO extension and checked that bug is still there.

so for now, SEO extension is saving me

[phenomlab]

@Hari So they haven’t actually fixed it in the core…? You should not have to rely on extensions to effectively “patch in” what should have been in core from the first release

[phenomlab]

@phenomlab said in Flarum SEO is worst and i still want to use it :

I received something of a backlash when I made the point around Flarum not being GDPR ready or compliant. I’m an information technology and security expert by trade and yet some other members suddenly decided they were experts in the subject matter, and decided to refute my claims by posting links to pointless websites that also had very little idea of what an adequate GDPR framework should look like. In fact, the tone of the discussion deteriorated to the point where my views were almost being discredited - in other words, quite toxic, and not something i wanted to be a part of anymore.

And it’s clear that my comment above was not without foundation. Flarum released 1.3 and still no GDPR support.

The phrase “…on the roadmap…” means absolutely nothing, and it’s one of the core reasons why I departed their ecosystem.

[Hari]

@phenomlab read this https://discuss.flarum.org/d/28602-implement-better-meta-descriptions-for-seo/18

Users have to shout to make them understand things! But it still takes years for the things to get materialised.

Our team has decided to stick with flarum irrespective of SEO or other features. Now there is nothing i can do about their decision.

When i bring this topic to them they said " you are the one who suggested us this system and spent almost $400-500 on extensions now don’t ask us to migrate" and they also said “deal with it” then i went speechless

If they want any new features i will send them fancy invoice

[phenomlab]

@Hari I think this alone said it all

fixing flarums mistakes using an extension is really unacceptable.

The Flarum Dev team have a somewhat bizarre view of what a core product should look like. Sure, I agree with it being lean to a degree, but any product like this should have the basics at least - with SEO and GDPR compatibility being available out of the box. Any forum product relies heavily on SEO for it be be recognised with content content being added, and if that isn’t done correctly, then you are heading into unchartered waters.

WordPress SEO is basic out of the box, but it’s at least functional to the point where you could actually use or without needing a plugin.

[Hari]

Lol, check this epic reply by flarum team

Flarum is coded in such a way where it tells spiders not to crawl any internal links by adding nofollow tag. How stupid this is @sinanisler

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/30981-set-all-internal-links-to-dofollow

For few minutes i thought i should register a domain called flarumSEOsucks.com

Boycott Flarum

[phenomlab]

@Hari said in Flarum SEO is worst and i still want to use it :

Flarum is coded in such a way where it tells spiders not to crawl any internal links by adding nofollow tag. How stupid this is

Yes, I agree this doesn’t make any sense. If you compare to WordPress, then (via a plugin of course) you can set the attribute as you wish. It doesn’t make any sense to take a blanket approach. I guess I unerstand why they are doing this, but it’s not an optimum SEO methodology.

@Hari said in Flarum SEO is worst and i still want to use it :

For few minutes i thought i should register a domain called flarumSEOsucks.com

They’d probably sue you for using the Flarum name in a URL