Google Groups vs. Yahoo eGroups or other group comm

[Freehold Fred]

As an off shoot from PT last night, what are the strengths and weakness of either for managing private group communication?

I am responsible for my high school's (I don't qualify for recent grad auto discount:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:) website. Privacy of our message board is EXTREMELY important and I don't want robots indexing it for search engines. I want it to smoothly interface with the website and if possible to look like it is part of the website much the same way a Google Search Bar can be embedded.

[Tortanick]

Why not just setup you're own forum MyBB (http://www.mybboard.com/)seems like a good free one accoding to wikipeida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyBB)? Here is a list of Internet forum software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software). With Apache you can edit htacess so you need a password to view the board. I don't know how but it can be done. And it can deny all non-local users to the board too.

and set up a robots.txt the good spiders won't index anything if that file says not to. Thats every major search engine :)

The upside to this setup is that google/yahoo can't get you're data while if you use a group you'll have to trust them. The downside to this setup is that its you, not the geniuses at google/yahoo who has to make sure hackers can't get in.

[Freehold Fred]

Thanks for some great ideas. I have already set up robots.txt to block certain folders, but I am waiting to see if it actually is effective. I think there are some outlook crawlers out there that ignore robots.txt.

Fred

Why not just setup you're own forum MyBB (http://www.mybboard.com/)seems like a good free one accoding to wikipeida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyBB)? Here is a list of Internet forum software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software). With Apache you can edit htacess so you need a password to view the board. I don't know how but it can be done. And it can deny all non-local users to the board too.

and set up a robots.txt the good spiders won't index anything if that file says not to. Thats every major search engine :)

The upside to this setup is that google/yahoo can't get you're data while if you use a group you'll have to trust them. The downside to this setup is that its you, not the geniuses at google/yahoo who has to make sure hackers can't get in.

[Tortanick]

Outlook has spiders? Why dose it need them?

I know spamer's won't make their harvesters obay robots.txt but Outlook?!