Search options (Page 2 of 2)

Hooray. Nearly identical to my setup. It has to be good.

As for the CSS issues, the base tag is what you need. In my case, I just put the full URL in there, and that makes things work nicely, but it adds far more dependance on the URL of the site being correct than you may want. But doing something with that tag should alleviate your problems.

The only other thing you might want to do is make all of those [NC, L] rather than just [L]. So everything is case insensitive and whatnot, but that's not a huge deal.

I'm also not quite sure RewriteBase is necessary, but I've never been able to figure out it's use.

/feed/atom vs /atom. I like /atom. Structurally it make sense, so feed seems a tad superfluous.

Yes, you can still assign specific moderators to specific forums for looks and ownership (in our case each moderator still has their own assigned forums, we just want other moderators to be able to nab any naughtiness if the assigned mod isn't around at the time). This just adds a toggle switch to the moderator group's permissions to allow anyone belonging to the group to have moderation privileges anywhere in the forums.

Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced that these URLs are really more friendly to search engines, but they sure look pretty. I think retro is in and every just loves the old straight up HTML feel. Or something like that.

My main complaint with pretty URLs is that a long list of parameters either become messy or make no sense. Take the searching in punBB for example. Things become more clean since everything is handled through a search id, but if it weren't for that, you're presented with a URL like this:

http://www.macaddict.com/forums/search. … rch=Submit

How in the world do you make that clean? You either do things like "search/action/search/keywords/GUI", but that doesn't really make sense, since these aren't in any way "subdirectories." The other solution is something like this "search/search/GUI", but that requires each parameter always be passed in in the same order, and it still doesn't really make semantic sense. And then what if you want a new parameter thrown somewhere in there? You end up ruining the order of everything else, and killing these supposedly "permanent" URLs.

I think permanency is the main draw draw of these URLs. Well, that and sexiness. If you happen to switch systems down the road, the transition is far more transparent, if you already have a good URL system setup. Then you just make your new system behave as your old one did, and no messy redirects between something stupid like viewtopic.php and topic.php. You set your original URLs up in such a generic manner that it should be extensible to any system down the road.

Now of course, if you really want to get with the cool crowd, the urls aren't supposed to have numerical ids in them, but rather textual handles. But it can't just be based on the subject title, since that can be edited, it has to be a non-editable field. But at some point, it just becomes insane. It's manageable on personal web sites or largely static sites, but this whole business gets infinitely more messy when thrown into the dynamic world.

Despite all my bashing, I do like them, and wouldn't mind seeing a filter function in future releases. Maybe not all URLs would be rewritten, but the basics like topics, posts, forums, etc. It sure beats what I did at MacAddict. It involves a PHP shell script that performs a search and replace on all the files based on some crazy parameters. It's not pretty, but it works... for the most part.

As for which method, I haven't looked at either in great detail, but they both seem to do pretty much the same thing. Rickard's via arrays, Shawn's via strings. To me arrays are always cleaner and therefor preferable, but that's just me and my fetish for arrays.

It might also be good to make an announcement for the fix, since this is a fairly glaring security bug. Or maybe we're just too protective over the privacy of our mod hideout at MacAddict. Now we will always wonder just how much Miles knows.

Yeah, well that's what you get for using a crappy browser.

And don't mind their criticism too much. They're just in a bad mood because things have changed. I like our work, so that's all that matters.

Yarg. Roo be to quick for me.

Ah, very interesting. I thought I looked at the default database schema and saw no indexes there either. But I guess I was hardly paying very good attention at 1 AM with the server going kaput like that. Thanks for the info, though, that's what I get for going with a beta converter for a production site. We like to live on the wild side. I'll go through tonight and make sure I indexed all the proper columns.

Oh, and here's the obligitory thank you for such great forum software. But really. It fulfills my ideals of forum software nearly perfectly. What's so strange is that nearly every mod that I had personally developed for phpBB was already apart of punBB. That means your brilliant.

As for PMs, polls and BBCode/smiley buttons, don't let the regulars get to you. Their just resistant to change, and personally I would like to keep our forums sans-those-features. In likelihood, we'll probably cave into a few features, but in my ideal world, punBB remains free of those features with mods available for those that need them. But that's just my take on it. Your free to do whatever you want.

Connor: Already submitted to the big list. Yeah, I like measuring wangs.

Dr.Jeckyl: Yeah, I'm lazy and went for the redirect route. I'll eventually convert all those links, but mainly just wanted to get everything converted this weekend. But thanks for the heads up.

And you guys should also check out the MaxAttack theme developed by a few mods/ex-mods there. It's a shining example of why CSS rocks. Just don't be afraid of Max.

But this is hardly a bug report anymore. Ah, well...

I've been fairly happy with Lunarpages for el cheapo hosting. And they even have public forums where most people seem happy. It's nothing spectacular, but lots of space for a cheap price. However, TextDrive is looking like a mighty nice alternative. Less space and bandwidth for a greater price, but they make up for it in features. It's not like I use my current space or bandwidth as it is. SSH access on a cheap host? Yay. I might just switch after my current year a lunarpages runs out.