vBulletin 3.0 Changes Here

More than anything this is simply a thread to remind myself what coding changes I've made to vBulletin 3. That way when an upgrade happens, it's easy to redo them.

• "archive" folder changed to "library" (no longer doing)
  
  
• archive PHP file altered so the <TITLE> tag shows better info (individual forum name, individual post title, etc.) where appropriate (fixed in vB 3.0.1, so not needed)
  
  
• functions_online.php file references "library" instead of "archive" so the Who's Online functions display properly for people in the archive. (no longer doing)
  
  
• External syndication script added to write the five most recent topics to a text file instead of generating dynamically. That script is called within the newthread.php script (regenerated when someone posts a new thread). (Altered this so no changes to newthread.php is required [nothing needs to be redone on an upgrade])
  
  
• In the functions.php file, I'm doing a few simple str_replace() functions so the URLs aren't so ugly. For example, when the board references the main forum, it will show as http://forums.digitalpoint.com/, instead of http://www.forums.digitalpoint.com/index.php? Takes into account URLs with session IDs in them so it doesn't mess them up. (functionality moved to variable replacement in Admin CP, so it carries over on upgrades, added str_replace to functions.php file so it also works for HTTP redirects)
  
  
• Altered the automatic robot detection (for suppressing session IDs within the URL) to support the new Yahoo Slurp spider as well as MSN Bot. (vB 3.0.1 added support for Yahoo, but still not MSN bot)
  
  
• Fixed bug in vBulletin where the username validation when sending a private message was using a case-sensitive query. In private.php, I changed WHERE username IN('" . implode("', '", $recipients) . "') to WHERE username=\"" . implode('", OR username="', $recipients) . "\" (fixed in vB 3.0.1 [thanks to me])

 

The last item on the list, I reported as a bug to the vBulletin developers (along with the code to fix it).

Updated to vBulletin 3.0.1 today and low and behold, there was my code in there... so don't need to hack it during updates anymore. yay!

- Shawn

 

It could be done either way... but forums.digitalpoint.com lets it be on a different server than www (which it is).

- Shawn

 

No idea how to do it with phpBB, your best bet would be to check phpbb.com or something...

 

It's pretty much just some str_replace functions within the functions.php file. Basically things like remove "index.php?", and replace it with nothing.

Also, one thing to note about running AdSense in a forum, is it uses a LOT of bandwidth. Usually more than all other users combined. Since the same page can have so many different URLs, Google will spider each unique page. Also, Google does not support HTTP 1.1, which allows for compression of the pages. So the same page spidered by Google typically takes 5-6 times more bandwidth than a user viewing it.

 

On line 1958, you can add this:

$output = str_replace (array ('"index.php?"', '.php?"'), array ('"./"', '.php"'), $output);

PHP:

It's the line before:

if ($vboptions['gzipoutput'] AND !headers_sent())

PHP:

Although, I ended up taking it out of there, and instead doing it within the Admin Control Panel -> Styles & Templates -> Replacement Variable Manager because it was a little cleaner for what I was needing to do.

 

Not strange... I get about 3,000 hits per day from Googlebot (not AdSense bot).

 

I think I only added MSN bot in addition to what was already there.

 

You call the external.php script and parse the results.