Tech Titbits » phpBB

Turn on Topic Reply Notification by default in phpBB

Soumik — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:18:42 +0000

In phpBB3, topic reply notification is set to “Off” by default. Unlike vBulletin, where you are automatically subscribed to threads which you reply to, in phpBB, you have to manually check “Notify me when a reply is posted” from the “Post reply” page to subscribe.

However, there is an easy file edit that will keep “Notify me when a reply is posted” checked by default when posting a reply.

Open ‘includes/functions_user.php’:

Find :

      'user_notify'         => 0,

Replace with :

      'user_notify'         => 1,

After this edit, users will be automatically subscribed to threads while replying.

Changing the default command prompt directory

Essential custom BBCodes for phpBB

Soumik — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:55:21 +0000

phpBB comes with a multitude of BBCodes that perform various functions. While most of these are sufficient for day-to-day forum activity, power users who crave for mre functionality on their boards, need custom-made BBCodes to satisfy their needs. Here is a list of most commonly used bbcodes on phpBB boards.

Video sharing

YouTube

BBCode usage :

[youtube]http://{SIMPLETEXT1}.youtube.com/watch?v={SIMPLETEXT2}[/youtube]]

HTML replacement :

Help line :

Usage:[youtube]Video URL[/youtube]

Google Video

BBCode usage :

[googlevideo]{NUMBER}[/googlevideo]

HTML replacement :

Help line :

Enter the video ID number -- the video ID is a 18 digit number is after docid=- in the URL

Text Alignment

Left
BBCode usage :

[left]{TEXT}[/left]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Right
BBCode usage :

[right]{TEXT}[/right]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Center
BBCode usage :

[center]{TEXT}[/center]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Spoiler

The spoiler BBCode can be used to hide spoilers from unsuspecting users. There are many ways to go about it, using Javascript or otherwise.

Without Javascript :
This BBCode adds a black background color to the text between the tags, making it unreadable unless highlighted.
Example :
This is a spoiler.
BBCode usage :

[spoiler]{TEXT}[/spoiler]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Using Javascript :
This creates a “Show” button which expands to reveal the spoiler when clicked.
Example :

Spoiler:

This is a spoiler.

BBCode usage :

[spoiler2]{TEXT}[/spoiler2]

HTML replacement :

Spoiler: 
{TEXT}

Another version :

This creates a spoiler which reveals itself on mousever.
Example :

This is a spoiler.

BBCode usage :

[spoiler3]{TEXT}[/spoiler3]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Strikethrough

Creates strike-through text.
Example :

Strike-through text.

BBCode usage :

[strike]{TEXT}[/strike]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Specify font
Specifies the font to be used in the text.
Example :

This is written in Arial.

BBCode usage :

[font={SIMPLETEXT}]{TEXT}[/font]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Pre tag

Text enclosed by these tags will retain their formatting.

[pre]{TEXT}[/pre]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Background colour

Changes the background to the specified colour.
BBCode usage :

[bgcolor={COLOR}]{TEXT}[/bgcolor]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Horizontal line

Adds a horizontal line after text.

[hr][/hr]

HTML replacement :

Subscript

For writing subscripted text.
Example :

Oleum – H2S2O7

BBCode usage :

[sub]{TEXT}[/sub]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

Superscript

For writing superscripted text.
Example :

(a+b)2 = a2+b2+2ab

BBCode usage :

[super]{TEXT}[/super]

HTML replacement :

{TEXT}

No related posts.

Add canonical links to phpBB

Soumik — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:21:12 +0000

It’s old news that Google and other major search engines have added support for the tag to help cut down on duplicate indexing of web pages. While plugins for Wordpress, Drupal and Magneto E-Commerce have been released, there has been none such modification for phpBB, where it is, arguably, most needed.

phpBB administrators have used various methods to cut down on this duplicate indexing issue, but adding a canonical URL seems to be the most subtly effective way. Google honours this tag very strongly, and upon finding it in a web page, it should only index the canonical page.

In the view of all this, I have put together a mod for phpBB3 to add the canonical links to phpBB board pages. The Canonical URL mod adds these lines to the phpBB pages :

In the index page :

In the forum pages :

In the topic pages :

For global threads* :

phpBB.com support thread :

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=1880545

Download modification :

Note :

Normally, global threads will have canonical URLs like this :

If you want the global threads to have canonical URLs with an “f=Y” query string, you just need to make a little change to the code. After installing the mod, open viewtopic.php.
Find :

   'U_CANONICAL'    => generate_board_url() . "/viewtopic.$phpEx?" . (($topic_data['topic_type'] == POST_GLOBAL) ? '' : "f=$forum_id&") . "t=$topic_id" . (($start) ? "&start=$start" : ''),

In-line Find :

? ''

Replace with :

? "f=Y&"

Replace ‘Y’ with the forum id of the forum you want your global threads to belong to.

Prevent duplicate indexing while moving threads in phpBB

Soumik — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:48:32 +0000

Moving phpBB topic/thread

Moving a thread from one forum to another cause duplicate indexing issues in phpBB3. In such cases, both the old URL and the new URL return a “200 Found” header response, even though the thread doesn’t exist in the old forum. Ideally, the old URL should 301 redirect to the new URL. In this post we’ll learn how to do this.

phpBB uses query strings like f=X&t=Y to determine which thread to serve, where ‘X’ is the forum id and ‘Y’ is the thread id. In a “view topic” URL, the f=X part of the query string serves no purpose except to note which forum the user is browsing and accordingly reflect it in the “Who is online” page. In fact, threads can be accessed using any ‘f=X’ value, even using non-existant forum ids. This isn’t much of a problem in normal situation, as the threads are linked using their corresponding forum ids, but the duplicate indexing problem arises when a thread(s) is moved from on forum to another.

Since we need to change query strings here, neither Redirect nor RedirectMatch will work as they don’t take query strings into account. We need to use RedirectCond using QUERY_STRING and a RewriteRule directive to externally rewrite the URL. We will will also send a “301 Permanently Moved” response header so that the spiders know the page has been moved. Let us suppose that a thread with thread id 5 is being moved from forum with forum id 1 to forum with id 2. Therefore, the old URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5

And the new URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5

We need to redirect the first URL to the second. Add these codes to your .htaccess file :

RewriteEngine On # Skip this if you have already turned on the rewriting engine
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5\&start=([0-9]*)$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5&start=%1 [R=301,L]

Skip the first line if you have already turned on the rewriting engine in your .htaccess file. The second RewriteRule redirects the other pages of the thread (with URL like viewtopic.php?f=X&t=Y&start=10). For each thread moved, we need to add these directives in the .htaccess file, changing the forum ids and topic id’s as necessary.

This method seems tedious and cumbersome, but this is the only method I could devise as of now. If anyone has a better method, you are welcome to leave a comment.

Add keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing a mod

Soumik — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:15:41 +0000

In these days of intelligent search engines, meta keywords and descriptions do not play a major role in SEO. Crawlers are more interested in the contents of the page rather than it’s keywords and descriptions. However, some people might still want to add keywords and descriptions to their pages, seeing that search engines like Yahoo still put some weightage on them.

A vanilla phpBB installation does contain keyword and description meta element, but they do not have any content. Here’s an easy to add meta keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing and/or maintaining any kind of a mod.

Go to /styles/prosilver/template/ and open the overall_header.html file with your favourite text editor. Click Edit > Select all, or just press ‘Ctrl +A’. After that, copy the selected code by clicking Edit > Copy or by pressing ‘Ctrl + V’.
Create a new HTML file in the same directory and name it index_header.html.
Open the newly created file and paste the contents of the clipboard in it.
In index_header.html, find :
Replace with :
Find :
Replace with :
Open /styles/prosilver/template/index_body.html.
Find :
Replace with :

From now on remember to update index_header.html when you make changes to overall_header.html, or else, the changes won’t show up in the index page.

Error: [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/functions.php on line 3526: Undefined index: HIDDEN_USERS_ZERO_TOTAL_AND

Soumik — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:04:58 +0000

After updating phpBB to v3.0.4, this error suddenly popped up after changing the language to something other than English :

[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/functions.php on line 3526: Undefined index: HIDDEN_USERS_ZERO_TOTAL_AND

It means that the language pack is outdated and “HIDDEN_USERS_ZERO_TOTAL_AND” isn’t defined in the common.php file in the corresponding language directory.

The solution is to install the updated language pack for the current version from the language pack directory, or if the language hasn’t been updated yet, wait for the maintainer to update it; or better still, update the language pack yourself!

phpBB: Redirect broken links after uninstalling an SEO mod

Soumik — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:11:19 +0000

SEO mods beautify your URLs and make them more spider friendly. But what happens when you uninstall an SEO mod? These SEOed URLs becomes broken and return an error code of ‘404 Not Found’. And these obsolete links can be very harmful for your Search Engine Results Page(SERP) rankings.

I’ve got emails from concerned phpBB forum administrators saying that their position in the SERPs have taken a dip after they had uninstalled their SEO mods and used my phpBB robots.txt duplicate indexing fix. What they need to do is redirect these broken links to the vanilla phpBB links. Using some simple rewrite rules, we can redirect those broken links to their proper place. And we’ll return a ‘301 Permanently Moved’ header so that the threads eventually recover their pagerank and SERP positions.
I’ll be using dcz’s Advanced phpBB3 SEO mod Rewrite as an example. This rewrites the URLs as follows :

viewforum.php?f=XX => any-keywords-fXX.html
viewforum.php?f=XX&start=YY => any-keywords-fXX-YY.html
viewtopic.php?f=XX&t=YY => any-keywords-fXX/topic-title-tYY.html
viewtopic.php?f=XX&t=YY&start=ZZ => any-keywords-fXX/topic-title-tYY-ZZ.html
viewtopic.php?p=XX => postXX.html
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=XX => memberXX.html

To redirect the broken/obsolete URLs, you need to add the following piece of code to your .htaccess file at the root of the forum :

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^[^/\.]+-f([0-9]+)\.html?$ /viewforum.php?f=$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^[^/\.]+-f([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html?$ /viewforum.php?f=$1&start=$2 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^[^/\.]+-f([0-9]+)/[^/\.]+-t([0-9]+)\.html?$ /viewtopic.php?f=$1&t=$2 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^[^/\.]+-f([0-9]+)/[^/\.]+-t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html?$ /viewtopic.php?f=$1&t=$2&start=$3 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^post([0-9]+)\.html?$ /viewtopic.php?p=$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^member([0-9]+)\.html?$ /memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=$1 [R=301,L]

These rules will ensure that those SEOed URLs are 301 redirected to the proper phpBB vanilla URLs, and you’ll eventually recover your pagerank and SERP position.

If you have a problem or you need mod_rewrite rules for another variant of an SEO mod, leave a comment and I’ll help you.

Prevent duplicate indexing of phpBB3 threads by Google

Soumik — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:12:59 +0000

In a default phpBB3 installation(without an SEO mod), the same thread can be accessed through many URLs. For example, the thread Favourite Animorphs fanfiction can be accessed through these different URLs :

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&p=659#p659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=60

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=659

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

http://animorphsfanforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60&st=0&sk=t&sd=a#p659

The agressive Googlebot might pick almost all of those links and it might lead to potential ranking problems in SERPs.

One way to resove this duplicate indexing is to install an SEO mod like PhpBB-SEO.com SEO mod or Handyman’s SEO mod. But, installing and updating a mod with each phpBB3 update and/or mod update might get harrowing and burdensome. An alternative, albeit easier way to prevent duplicate indexing is to add these lines to your robots.txt :

User-agent: * Disallow: /viewtopic.php?p= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?=&p= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?t= Disallow: /viewtopic.php?start= Disallow: /*&view=previous Disallow: /*&view=next Disallow: /*&sid= Disallow: /*&p= Disallow: /*&sd=a Disallow: /*&start=0

This will forbid all bots following robots.txt directives to crawl the redundant URLs. Your threads will only be accessible to the bots through the URL http://www.domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=X&t=X.

Note(1): If you display Google Adsense ads in your forum pages, you might need to allow the Google Adsense bot(Mediapartners-Google) to access the ‘forbidden’ URLs, so that it can crawl the pages and display relevant ads. So, you need to add these ‘extra’ lines to your robots.txt :

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow:

This will allow the Mediapartners-Google bot to access the forbidden URLs.

Note(2): If your forum is on a subdirectory(say /forum/) rather than the root, append “/forum” to the robots.txt directives. It should look like this :

User-agent: * Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?p= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?=&p= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?t= Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?start= Disallow: /forum/*&view=previous Disallow: /forum/*&view=next Disallow: /forum/*&sid= Disallow: /forum/*&p= Disallow: /forum/*&sd=a Disallow: /forum/*&start=0

If you face any problems, leave your comments and I’ll look into it.