Members of the message board:

A few days ago, during the transition converting culteducation.com to culteducation.com, a backup failure at the ISP (Intenet Service Provider) led to the loss of two years of data base files at this message board. This included individual posts, entire threads, archived private messages, membership approvals, everything from September 2011 to August 2013.

I am deeply sorry for this system administration failure.

Everything was done in an effort to retrieve the lost files, but it has proven to be an impossible task and the files cannot be restored.

Anyone who registered from September 2011 to August 2013 will have to register again to become a current active member.

Members that received pre-approved status to post without moderation will have go through that approval process again, which will be done as soon as possible.

There are some general backup archives accessible through the Internet on the World Wide Web where some of the lost posts and information from this message board may still appear.

See [archive.org]

For example see [web.archive.org]

Searching through this Internet Archive may yield some of the lost material and information, which might then be copied and placed back into certain threads and/or used to create new threads.

This message board is now part of the Cult Education Institute online Web sites, formerly known as the Ross Institute of New Jersey.

The Cult Education Institute, which is an educational tax-exempted charity, is a member of the American Library and New Jersey Library Associations.

By changing the name of the institute and its domain address people searching for information about cults can more easily find related information here.

A great deal of work is being done now to modernize and generally update the look and functionality of the Cult Education Web sites.

Please be patient and you will see positive changes in the coming weeks.

I have been assured by the hosting system administrator at the ISP that there will be no more problems with backup.

This backup failure was an isolated event, no other such failure has ever occurred at this message board during its more than decade long history, nor at the larger archives launched in 1996.

For those that shared and cared by posting here, in the hope that you might help others with useful information, I can only say again how deeply sorry I am about the loss of files here due to the system failure.

My hope is that you will move on through this transition and continue sharing important information about destructive cults, controversial groups, movements and related topics of interest.

There are few resources online that the general public can access with such information.

This message board has played a pivotal role in informing the public by often exposing abusive groups and leaders, which has at times led and/or contributing to media reports, law enforcement and/or regulatory action.

Thank you for your concern and participation in this process.

Please continue to participate and express your concerns here.

Sincerely,

Rick Alan Ross, Executive Director
The Cult Education Institute
www.culteducation.com

The loss of so much information and debate is indeed a tragedy, although some of the more active threads (like the Struthers Memorial Church thread which is my main interest) have managed to recover all the lost posts from use of the google cache and a number of local records.

Not much that can be done however, and thanks for the apology - it does make a difference to people to know that the loss has at least been recognised.

I do wonder about the new arrangements however, as there also seems to be an ongoing problem, which is that the forum posts no longer appear as the result of google (nd other search engine) searches.

Is this a policy decision? I know there are things called "spiders" that gather information for google and other search engines, and that how they react to a site depends on the "robots.txt" file. There may of course be lots of other techie bits I do not know about, but I know that it is possible to tell google not to use the pages in the results of searches.

What I am wondering is whether the forum pages have been set to not allow searches and, if so, whether this is deliberate.

Either way, it seems to me that these pages should be searchable so that members of the public seeking information about an organisation gets the forum discussions included in the results.

Could someone in the techie team please look into this and respond. I would really like to see the valuable forum posts being included in the results of google searches.

Yes, I would like to add my support to that too. It has been a long time since we appeared in Search Engine searches when we used to regularly appear on the first page.

It's like a double blow to lose the posts and then lose our standing with search engines, which we all worked so hard to achieve.

Thank you, in advance, for taking the time to look into this and helping to restore our visibility on the web.

Biiiig love and best wishes
Cbarb

RR moderator,

Would it be possible to get a response to this?

It would be really useful to know whether posts on this message board were searchable through google or not, and whether this was a policy decision or some sort of technical issue.


Thanks.

There has been no policy decision about SEO regarding this board.

Posts have always been searchable and will be searchable. This is and will remain a public messsage board and resource.

The entire Web presence of the Cult Education Institute, formerly known as the Ross Institute, is going through redevelopment. The Web team has been deeply involved in finishing work on the 36,000 article archive, which includes hundreds of subsections.

The Web team will be working on this message board soon. All the data lost through the message board backup failure will be restored and other issues will be resolved.

Just fyi, this webforum has been blocked from being indexed by the Google search engine, as explained here.

[forum.culteducation.com]

But if you go to this webforum's root page
[forum.culteducation.com]

and then "view page source" you can see the webmaster put the "noindex" code into this website.
So this webforum is blocked from being indexed in Google.


<title>Cult Education Forum</title>
...
forum.culteducation.com/"/cache/bootstrap.min.js"></script><meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Its also blocking this subforum as well.

<title>Cult Education Forum :: &quot;Cults,&quot; Sects, and &quot;New Religious Movements&quot;</title>
....
</script><meta name="robots" content="noindex">