I just found this: http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18132
Does that mean you * can't* rewrite the urls in v.1.2* ?
1 2008-04-11 19:54
Re: url rewrite (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 modifications, plugins and integrations)
2 2008-04-11 19:48
Re: url rewrite (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 modifications, plugins and integrations)
Smartys wrote:
Moved to Modifications
But where is it??
This is exactly what I need - I think.
My robots.txt blocks all php pages, but I would like the viewforum & viewtopic pages to be searchable.
3 2007-07-12 01:47
Re: the philosophy of spam? (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)
In the case of -ahem, minority (illegal) markets - it looks likely. But, in general, they wouldn't! No point asking "would you" coz you're a Web guru 
I bet your auntie wouldn't click on a spam link either, and that's the point, marketing-wise.
Thank you very much for making me think harder, Smartys. I'm dog-tired now & have to go to sleep.
Please will someone pick this up?
Cherry
[edited: overdid the smileys again]
4 2007-07-12 01:14
Re: the philosophy of spam? (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)
Smartys wrote:
(spamming your URL would be considered blackhat SEO)
Well, they do seem to be targeted (in a very thick way, as outlined above).
The blackhat thing bothers me a lot. After going to a bunch of SEO meetings, I ended up thinking an Evil BlackHat SEO outfit would be a good choice for certain short-term offers!
But still ... So spams get you a load of links, which gets you a higher position (which means you're rubbish at providing relevant content & using your html tags, but never mind that) ... So visitors click on your site, take a 1-second look at it and click away. So how is that worth any expenditure? Somebody must be paying for it, somewhere down the line ....
I'm getting the picture. But I'm still mystified: people aren't that stupid! Or are they?
5 2007-07-12 00:43
Re: the philosophy of spam? (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)
Smartys wrote:
they make money by posting the links all over the place regardless of how many people actually buy the stuff. There's an SEO aspect to that: get your link everywhere, your rank on search engines goes up for your search terms.
So spam is an SEO advantage?
Well, okay, it has nothing to do with the products advertised .... [excuse me, I'm thinking on my keyboard here] .... and the reason the spams seem 'targetd' is because of the search engines' improved relevance checking??
Blow me. I should hire a spammer.
cherry
6 2007-07-12 00:30
Re: the philosophy of spam? (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)
Yes - and thanks, as ever, Smartys!
Still and all: I have a background in direct marketing and, regardless of entry cost, you wouldn't persist with a medium which alienated more prospects than it converted.
I can see that spam might generate new punters for illegal porn, assuming certain market conditions - but fake antidepressants? Fake cheap flights? You get enough genuine offers for the real thing, nobody would buy from a link they clicked on by mistake.
There's a difference between "email marketing" - another bugbear, but more suited to another forum - and the idiotically targeted crap that plagues forums & such.
It is targeted, and very clumsily: my complementary therapy client gets rubbish about C!aL1$ and yoga pills(??); my home-improvement client gets V1@gra and porn. You'll notice that neither of them receive spams from Aveda or Screwfix; genuine advertisers have more sense than to piss their prospects off that much.
If spam had any value, Screwfix for one (they're not averse to a well-placed unsolicited message) would be spamming. My suspicion is that the whole spam thang has created its own momentum and is, in fact, totally pointless.
I'd like to understand a bit more about it than that Wikipedia entry - which seems to be the only 'authority' ever quoted and is a bit simplistic! Because, if you don't know why & how it spawns, you can't hope to control it.
Yours directly 
Cherry
7 2007-07-11 23:42
Topic: the philosophy of spam? (8 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)
I've read through most of the spam-related threads here, and in my lovely host's [Site5] forums. There are always lots of good suggestions - and they're usually shot down by experts. I am still mystified about why spammers spam?
First off, the problem:
For most of us, who make websites for real people to use, it's that your ordinary user isn't so wedded to your client's subject that they'll mountaineer their way over a series of obstacles to post a reply. They have other things to do - like feed the baby, pour another drink, watch Coronation Street ... etc. We offer forums as a service to the client - who benefits from whatever user discussions are generated. In effect, our contributors are helping the website owner. There's a limit to their patience & committment. The more measures we put in place to reduce spam, the less engaging our websites become. One of my clients had a major porn spam problem. I added captchas to all of his response pages - after which the spam stopped, but so did his genuine replies.
Question:
What, exactly, does your spammer gain by spamming? I chose this forum to post my question, because punbb (while imperfect - sorry, Rickard & co) really does have several 'intuitive' anti-bot mechanisms already built in
My forums are being spammed - it seems, on examination, by physical individuals, not bots (with the exception of limpy@privatepop3.com, who I think is a bot - s/he/it registers, whilst the rest seem to have discovered an exploit that I have yet to identify). I appreciate that bot spam is mainly sent out from hijacked intermediaries - that still seems pointless to me but it probably was a brilliant idea to the person who originated it, way back when?!
It's very easy to understand how a baby-programmer-to-be would spam; "Whoo! Look what I can do!! Kewl!!!" However, most ex-spammers/griefers quickly find a more profitable outlet for their skills ... and make great programmers. I can't believe any of them would persistently post bunches of ads for fake pharms and/or abuser porn. So what's going on? Does anyone know why it happens?
One mystified Cherry
[edited to diminish smileys]
8 2007-07-11 14:05
Re: anyone can post (4 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
Fair point, Smartys!
And thanks for the explanation 
Cherry.
And ... thanks a bunch to the six people who posted spam in the hour after I wrote this post [sigh].
9 2007-07-11 13:31
Re: anyone can post (4 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
Thanks - I'm trying to figure it out
There are some entries in the database that look a bit odd to me, like users with a group_id of 32000.
Is that any kind of a clue as to what's gone wrong??
EDITED to add:
Might it be easier to fix the database, then add some code to post.php that double-checks the user is logged in?
That is, it might be easier if I knew what to add! I'd love a pointer .... please :confused:
Thanks again -
10 2007-07-11 10:30
Topic: anyone can post (4 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
Hello - can you give me a quick pointer, please?
I confess to having made some slight mods (mainly to page content) but it now seems that anyone can post - even if unregistered - and their post shows up in the forum as from an Administrator, which is embarrassing since, naturally, such posts are almost always porn spam!
Evidently I need to fix something, to ensure that post.php is only available to genuinely logged-in users 
Where should I be looking to do this??
Thank you
the forum itself is here: http://homeholistics.com/new_share/foru … m.php?id=5
Cherry.
11 2006-11-06 23:37
Re: How the hell do I do this?? (7 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 modifications, plugins and integrations)
Robbie,
What you need to do is basically to use main.tpl as another html page in your site. (leaving the punbb code in, of course!)
Design a page, or use an existing page layout - nice-looking site, btw
Paste the punbb code in the area where you want the actual forum to appear.
For example, in this page: http://homeholistics.com/new_share/forum/index.php
the forum sits in the div called c2, so the code where the div starts goes like this ......
<div id="c2">
<div id="punwrap">
<div id="pun<pun_page>" class="pun">
<div id="brdheader" class="block">
<div class="box">
<div id="brdtitle" class="inbox">
<pun_title>
<pun_desc>
</div>
<pun_navlinks>
<pun_status>
</div>
</div>
<pun_announcement>
<pun_main>
<pun_footer>
</div>Also make sure you include all the bits that should be in the <head> for PunBB to work, then complete your page as normal. Save it as main.tpl.
Two other things that floored me for a while, which you'll need to know as I think your site is x-mapped to PHP, like mine:
[1] Add the .tpl extension into your htaccess file (so that it's mapped to PHP)
[2] If you have PHP include files in your page, you need to make special includes for PunBB. You save them into the include/user/ directory with a .php extension. In each one, put
<?php require_once('../myinclude.htm'); ?> # or whatever your include is actually called #then change the include in your page to read
<pun_include "myuserinclude.php"> # or whatever name you gave it #That's basically it, though I keenly feel your frustration!!!
Now, if anybody's come up with a fab widget to make restyling the board CSS any easier, I'll be grateful to hear about it 
Cheers,
Cherry
12 2006-03-02 07:52
Re: nutty generated urls (5 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
Hi, elbekko
No, but my consultant has just emailed back saying he thinks there's a problem with the server configuration 
I'm going to try & get my hosts to restart Apache before we spend much more time on this.
Thank you for your help!
Cherry.
13 2006-03-01 19:52
Re: nutty generated urls (5 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
I'm really sorry, I should have posted in troubleshooting.
I asked an expert to make some modifications, specifically to overcome this weird behaviour with the file paths - so I can't explain exactly what he's done! I was kind of hoping you'd be able to give us a clue as to what might be causing it: I've not seen this happen before with PunBB and my base URL is correct.
Is there a certain page or directory I should examine, to find out how the paths are generated?
Thanks, Connor, and sorry again for posting to the wrong forum.
Cherry.
14 2006-03-01 19:31
Topic: nutty generated urls (5 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
My (otherwise fabulous) PunBB generates some very strange urls. As you click through the forum links, the paths get longer & longer, until you end up with something like http://homeholistics.com/ forum/forum/topic/forum/topic/forum ......
This was making life unduly complicated, so we tried using mod_rewrites to tidy up the links.
Trouble is, every time we fix one problem, another one pops up!
The biggest difficulty is the forum/forum/ business.
Some of the pages, eg user profile, actually do have a path like so:- http://homeholistics.com/
new_share/forum/forum/profile/7
therefore, just eliminating the duplication won't work because other links will break.
Please can you illuminate why this is happening - and what's the best way to handle it?
Thank you
Cherry.
[edited to break up the urls]
15 2006-02-06 17:16
Re: Smiley Menu 0.7 (28 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 modifications, plugins and integrations)
elbekko wrote:
3) I'm pretty sure the images have alt tags wink But if you want to set them, it's in the do_smilies function in parser.php. Lemme check if it's set
-- BekkoEDIT: Yeps, I was right
Code:$text = preg_replace("#(?<=.\W|\W.|^\W)".preg_quote($smiley_text[$i], '#')."(?=.\W|\W.|\W$)#m", '$1<img src="img/smilies/'.$smiley_img[$i].'" width="15" height="15" alt="'.substr($smiley_img[$i], 0, strrpos($smiley_img[$i], '.')).'" />$2', $text);
As you can see, the alt tag is set to show the image name smile (I think, it's rather messy to me :S) But of course, you can easily change that.
Doh, silly me, I was using Mozilla so I didn't see them!
I copied the alt part of your line, changed it to title and now I got 'em in both browsers
Thanks, Bekko.
Cherry
16 2006-02-06 15:21
Topic: CSS files doubled up (1 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)
Hello
Some of my changes to the Oxygen template affect the overall page layout, so I needed the link to Oxygen.css to appear at the end of my list of style sheets. It works great, but pun_head is also inserting the link right at the top of the page .... So all the forum style sheets are being linked twice!
I tried removing it from header.php, but then the whole page disappeared.
It's not a massive issue but it's annoying. Can you advise how to stop the stylesheet loading automatically, please?
If it helps, the page is here: http://homeholistics.com/new_share/forum/index.php
Thanks!
Cherry.
[edited because I wasn't paying attention]
17 2006-02-06 05:37
Topic: another user forum :) (0 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 show off)
It's here: http://homeholisticscom.co.uk/new_share/forum/index.php
I'm not saying it's any great shakes but I'm pleased with it, and so is Ms. Client 
It took less than 10 minutes to install - amazing!!!
Then another - er, few hours - to fit into the standard layout & re-style, etc. It's a huge compliment to you that I managed it in one go: that's some very, very neat code you've made.
Thanks a million, Rickard. We're still broke but we WILL send you a few quid when we have some money!
Meanwhile, have a hug.
Cherry.
18 2006-02-06 05:26
Re: Smiley Menu 0.7 (28 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 modifications, plugins and integrations)
I've just added this, and it works like a charm - that's a big compliment, as I'm not exactly Mrs Code Queen!
Apart from a big THANK YOU, I have these 3 comments:
1] You didn't add your license disclaimer thingy, so I've written one in
2] I moved the position to after the ul.bblinks and took the width&margin properties off - as I don't have a mile-wide screen (and nor do most users), that looks neater.
3] As a good webaunty, I need/want to add alt tags to the smilies. Where do I put them?
Just seen that you've released another update, so maybe you've answered the above.
Thanks for the smilies!
Cx