I am trying to figure out what the best practice is as far as a Sitemap and a forum with many threads goes. I've read the answers at Should I put forum threads into my sitemap?; however, there wasn't any sort of best practices listed. If I just put the URL to my forum index page without going into any of the threads, will search engine bots parse my forum or will they only index the page in the sitemap?
My MVC forum is small right now, but it has the potential of being quite large. I don't know if it's a great idea to have a huge sitemap that lists out all of the individual threads. I'm trying to be as search engine friendly as possible. Is it good to create a Sitemap with only threads that have been active for X number of days? Where should I draw the line at how many URLs should be in the Sitemap?
Middas,
Let me clear one important point here; search engine crawler did not require sitemap to crawl your website !!
Crawler used to find your page by following links placed on pages and index pages accordingly. The motive behind submitting sitemap is; there are few pages on website which are placed on deep URL or not easily accessible by web crawlers. So, when they visit your sitemap, they can reach to those page and can index them.
Now as far as your forum is concern, you should create sitemap for main category pages or can edit sitemap periodically with newly added pages.