Quick poll: Should search engines be able to index the forum?

As the title says. We haven't made a prior decision on this, but I think some community input might be useful!
(I'm going to caveat that this poll isn't going to be treated as binding, it's just so we have some opinions to work with.)

Benefits of the forum being indexable:

• People who are looking for this kind of space are able to find it easily, allowing the forum to grow organically.
• Forum content becomes searchable using search engines (and they generally provide a better search experience).

Possible issues with the forum being indexable:

• It limits discoverability of the forum to the friends of users who are willing to advertise it.
• Potential bad actors (such as spambots and dodgy 'lolcow' website types) can find the forum more easily.
• It can discourage people from posting as openly as they want to, in case their posts are discovered and connected to them.

Note that even if the forum remains indexable, this only applies to threads in the SFW boards. The NSFW boards and other content, like user profiles, are never indexable.

Any further questions, points, or thoughts are welcome in the thread!

I think it would make sense as a long-term thing, but I wouldn't do it until the forum is out of this sort of soft-launch state.

You also might need to bring on an extra mod as a precaution, I would hope spam wouldn't get bad immediately but I'm not sure how bad Weight Gaming gets it, since that forum is indexed.

Given I have some past issues with and lingering insecurities revolving around various bad actors (big part of why I post so few places now!), my vote's in favor of not indexing.

I'd personally wanna keep us un-indexed. Maaaaaybe reconsider once we're out of soft launch but I kind of like keeping this a more obscure corner of the web

i think this is the exact sort of place that certain shitty websites would loooove to find. let's not.

Yeah, on second thought after sleeping on it I think the risk is unfortunately too high of bad actors flooding this place. Don't wanna put it on you all to have to deal with that.

I feel like indexing would be useful if the site or space being indexed into search engines were 1) Spaces set up to promote a business or 2) If those who use the space unanimously agree that they want the self-promotion to sail out there.

I don't feel like the space really suits that, given how specific and intended to be To Ourselves as it is currently and if there was any time where that would be useful, then now would be too soon.

Prod us again at a later point on how we feel and maybe things would change then but the risks definitely outweigh the benefits, IMO.

(Edited this to fix some glaring words-go-that-way issues with my post that I couldn't get over, should be fine now though!)

Thanks for the input y'all!

The poll isn't expiring for a few days yet but so far the voting has been unanimous, so I've gone ahead and blocked search engines from indexing the site. (It might still show up for a bit if any engines got in there really early, but we're such a new site that it's unlikely we'll rank highly for anything really.)

I think making it visible to search engines would allow certain state-sponsored trolls from a certain site to find us. Hard pass. Overkill? Maybe, but in this era, there's no such thing as too much protection.