Possible Alternative Situation: If we attract too much of the wrong attention, we end up with spam-bots and rule-breakers who would turn this place into a garbage dump, or use up all of the admins' time in their attempts.
I briefly hosted my own backwoods, highly-specialized message board, the only links to which existed on a backwoods Wikipedia page and a backwoods Google Group. It's unbelievable how much bot traffic I was constantly having to fend off.
I'm not a web hosting expert or web designer, nor have I ever administered a website before. But I suspect that that's likely due to the fact that bots are usually run tandem to spiders, which are enumerating every single link on every page, and then visiting each of those pages, and repeating the process. If your message board was technically able to be indexed by Google or any other search engine, I feel like it'd be quite easy for the spider to find your message board, regardless of how obscure it was for the ordinary person. At that point, it comes down to the bot protections you have in place (CAPTCHAS, etc), and the type of message board software you're using, if you didn't code it yourself. Or maybe you simply needed someone constantly blocking and kicking bots like Cain, here.
