Ensure the .htaccess file is EXACTLY as it looks, with no extra line breaks, and in plain text format. Also, you should have mod_rewrite compiled into your Apache installation (not sure how to do this one, sorry - most web servers have it already)

That's wonderful! It's woring now.

Thank you very much.

cscgal, I guess the lack of responce to my previous post means that there is no way to fix the bug I mentioned? (wrong link in style selection when inside a forum)

Oh, sorry about that. I missed your question. Unfortunately, this is a known bug that I have yet to look into how to fix.

I hope it's not very difficult to fix (from what I've observed, it only needs "styleid" variable to be parsed somewhere as well).

Actually not so. Because the URLs for the style dropdown are all created via PHP files. I would have to take a look at it to know how much needs to be changed.

im on 3.5.3 and when i look in functions.php i cant find the code you said and i did look at your 3rd post and i dont think i quite undrstand i see global_complete in the functions.php file but im not sure were to pt it in thee since the string is

[PHP]{
($hook = vBulletinHook::fetch_hook('global_complete')) ? eval($hook) : false;
}[/PHP]

sorry if i have missed something very obvios here

and thats for the great sounding hack :cheesy:

Dani,

Your mod-rewrite is very good but it does leave some possibilties of duplicate content, which could result in Serps appearing slightly lower than they should do.

Would you be willing to re-code this slightly to fix the issues if i was to point out where the duplications are coming from?

I understand the search engines very well but i am afraid i am no good with mod-rewrites & i have been trying to look at your code & see how i might edit it myself but its a little over my head.

The first area is easy to fix & i was able to do this myself, its caused by simple naming conventions in your code - your current code produces two seperate URL's for forum threads. The first is in the latest thread shown on the homepage - the thread's URL is different if you enter by the forum.

To fix this just name this variable the same as thread in forums - easy.

The next two required fixes, i can't do myself.

1) The all posts by user contains an ankor link to the post, but this still uses the dynamic string - it should be the same URL as post ... html#post234 , etc
2) The Forum Jump still contains the dynamic URL's - these should also be changed to html because search engines can follow these links & index them.

I believe that fixing all these should stop any duplications, unless i have missed any scenerios in VB.

The result will be higher pagerank for the forums & higher Serps.

I as well get 404's with links to /forums/forum2.html for all my forums in vb 3.5.2. Htaccess file has been uploaded and everything seems right.

Anyone on this?

I still am not running 3.5, and therefore cannot vouch for it definitely working. It SHOULD work, and people have told me they were able to get this hack to work via 3.5 *without* using plugins, but that's as far as I know.

The last post in thread URL produced (lastpostinthreadXXX.html) simply 301 redirects to the appropriate threadXXX.html page. It doesn't create a duplicate of the thread. This is proper SEO convention. Having the # appending a URL does not create a new URL as does a query string. The search enginges understand it to be a reference to a particular area of the page.

The forum jump is entirely irrelevant because a jumpbox is a form, and search engines cannot fill out or submit forms. However, it would be nice to hack for standardization alone. However, the benefits don't really outweigh the need to php hack the darn thing.