Pretty annoying. Highly, actually. Some titles are worse than others.

Putting it in a single h1 tag towards the top would be more effective in my opinion than spamming every post with it for keyword reach.

The little inline image that you have with alt tag isn't a bad idea either.

But it seems like overkill to negatively impact the user experience in the interest of SEO. There are plenty of good alternatives.

Can they be made not-bold?

And/or hidden as a user option?

The little arrow that sends you to the quoted post.

Repeating the same word/phrase isn't going to help SEO results, I don't think.

I have to go with they make the screen too busy. I'd go without them if there was a user CP function to turn them off. That way you can still get your keyword density credits and my eyes won't have to deal with the titles.

Yeah, it's hard to know what thread I'm in when I use tabs.

<img src="http://www.imageadventures.com/other/threadTitles.gif">

They probably wouldn't be so objectionable if they weren't bolded.

These changes both excite and scare me.

I don't like them either. Not a huge deal, but a mild annoyance. The quoted post thing is cool though.

Is there anyway the titles can be put in the blue header of the post (and not bolded)? That would be win-win-win. Or can they be in white, so the search engines will see them, but we don't have to?

I can't find the Sex with Hippos thread.

Good advice, if you want to get blacklisted by google.

It's a non-premium only feature.

@ The Bus

ιππος hippos meaning "horse" and πόταμος potamus meaning "river"), often shortened to "hippo", is a large, mostly plant-eating African mammal, one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae (the other being the Pygmy Hippopotamus). It is the heaviest extant artiodactyl, though quite a bit shorter than the Giraffe.

I was just thinking that. Visually, any text breaks up the thread. Signatures are bad enough, but we've trained ourself to go to the blue line and read what's after that. It just makes it visually cluttered.

Avatars don't really do that since they are way on the left and don't break up the flow of the thread. On the other hand, I think they make it easier to quickly visually identify who is posting something (provided people keep their avatars for a long enough time).

Add me to the list of those who finds it very annoying, especially when bolded like that.

I'm just quoting this because I forgot what thread I'm in and I need to see the thread title at the top of my own post to find out.

Oh, that's right.

Why not replace the bolded script with some additional useful keywords, if it's being done for the benefit of Google and search engines and not the users?

I think even unbolded they would be sort of a wreck.

I'm not really bothered by it.

Good call.

Agreed, although I refuse to admit i've been trained to do anything.

Agree about the Avatars though, i've gotten used to scanning for my Lakers logo to find my post quickly.

They've finally found something I can't adblock.

....this is annoying. I'm guessing that I'll still forget to delete it from my posts 90% of the time.

It depends on how you do it, but it *can* help if done properly.

That would be an ideal solution, and one that we might consider if the decision is made that they benefit the sites SEO. Since we haven't collected enough data on it, we can't it allocate dev time.

Them being bolded does help with SEO, but I think unbolding them would be acceptable.

Moving them into the blue is possible, but I think the loss of that whitespace (or bluespace in this instance) would have a negative impact on the forum. It would also be a template hack, which make software upgrades more tedious. Also, text that's the same color as the background (called "hidden text") is a great way to get banned from google, as pointed out by Thor.

Me either. Although it's a great distraction from what's going on in this thread.....