The last time I used a tool, excluding via robots.txt was also sufficient for URL removal.

Recently, Google has updated their documentation to strongly encourage you to use URL removal only for things like exposing confidential information, and not to clean up old pages or errors in your GWT account (see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119). I know many people still use the tool for that type of stuff, but wanted to point out that change.

The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.

Can you elaborate a little on the forum being about "all topics"? That sounds a bit broad, and possibly an uphill battle if you're trying to be all things to all people. Would this be a place where one could talk about Christmas wreath designs and song lyrics and video game strategies and knitting?

It looks like it's related to a toolbar where people are paid to click on ads. Skylancers.net and skylancers.com appear to be connected, based on the whois info, and on this FB post http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skylancers/200579273364198. Check out the dot com site for some more info.

Years ago, I was subcontracting and one of the web designer's clients refused 2-3 AdWords charges that totaled about $35. ALL of the Adwords accounts that I had were suspended without warning, even though they were different clients. I had everything in Google Webmaster Tools. They do look at these signals.

Have you considered just rewriting your URLs so they don't use extensions at all? That way, when you use a different technology, you don't need to rewrite your URLs once again. If you look at SEOmoz, you see they don't use .php or .html as extensions, but instead have no extensions.

The page looks OK to me, the category looks like may others have done the same thing. I'm seeing hundreds of pages with thousands of articles similar to http://zoomation.asu.edu/gallery/zoomation_text.

My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0

Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?