Frances Bell

This is an interesting thread and fascinating detective work. I too received the email , and skimmed through the video. It seemed to be fairly harmless to me (though please let me know if I have exposed myself to some security breach ).
Nicoe Snyder seems to be a very active Moodle member. So how do we feel about being contacted by other Moodle members? OK if they show themselves with their Moodle identity? OK if they don't contact too many of us? OK if they post the message on the forum?
On a practical level, I have thought about how email addresses could be harvested semi-automatically.  By using, Participants|More Detailed| Show all participants you could obtain a very large screenful, cut and paste if elsewhere and pull out strings next to email address:
Suggestion - remove Show all participants for detailed view.

I am a big fan of glossary, and the random glossary entry block, as this can be very encouraging when using student-built glossaries as a knowledge creation exercise.  However, I did come across one "feature" when using them like this.  Students were encouraged to cite their souce, and so glossary entries had long urls in them.  When such an entry appeared randomly on course front page, the block was as wide the url, and this meant the middle area of the screen, say where the topics are, was squeezed up.  It looked very odd. You can get students to use a named link rather than the url itself but that is not gong to be be easy to enforce.
Anyway, the moral is, do use glossary for a link directory, but be careful about using this in a random glossary entry block.

Thanks N.  Google does crawl us regularly and we come up the ranking for specific references to our name 'CAB' or 'CABWEB' combined with related search terms, but we are not coming for the sort of search terms people might use who did not know our name e.g. 'international student collaboration online' etc.  I have had a good look at your site, and I note that you use the news item version of the front page, and have fairly wordy news items. For example, the word hieroglyph appears 5 times on your front page.
Hmmm, that has given me something to think about.  I'll consult the team next week.
BTW, I am really impressed with the level and quality of interaction on your open discussion forums

I asked a related question about Search Engine Optimisation  and got no replies at all !!
Come on Moodlers, can't you help us with tags and getting up the list in Google, etc.?

I know that there has been a discussion on how to keep Google out of your site, but I wanted to ask about how get our Moodle front page "up the list" in Google and other search engines.  I wondered if there are any tips .
Should we be using important keywords in particular parts of the configuration and /or content, e.g. site description?  I have done some experiments on searching with Google and I have not worked out makes us come up or down the list for different word combinations.
BTW, our site is http://www.cabweb.net .
I have answered some questions recently in response to N Hansen's prompt so I hope that some good answers will come back my way