Smartys, the link you pointed a couple of posts ago explains it kind of straight forward.
I didn't want to be trying to make a point out of this, my intention was more sharing this information with punbb users.
I don't want to stop anybody from using sitemaps, i am just sharing my experience with them. None of us know know how does google handles it's data. My experience with google sitemaps was bad, it basically made my traffic go down, and i think this is very likely to happen to other people.
On the other hand, if you are satisfied with sitemaps and they actually brought you traffic, of course you have no reason to drop them.

Liquidator,
Sorry, i don't have time to put effort on that at the moment. But, yep... that would be cool, there's already a minimalistic view, those would be the next step for a full featured ( from the user perspective ) minimum look punbb.

I got reminded that punbb outputs valid xhtml, i wonder if it wouldn't be beter if someone release a flat style instead. I can't think of anything that makes that impossible. Maybe we better wait for the new markup on version 1.3

Yes, i am talking about the situation discussed in your second link. But not only.
But that's actually the big point. If you submit a sitemap and go from zero to a thousand indexed pages, you probably get very happy, but did you remember to check how much traffic comes from google? You will probably get 10 visitors a month if you are lucky.
That's the google illusion, how many times do you click on the number 2 to check the second result page on google? Personally i do that in less than 1% of my searches. So whats the point of having thousands of indexed pages if they don't show on the first page? I would prefer to have one single page that is all the time on top of google.
I know it's a big temptation, having all the pages indexed as quickly as that, but the truth is that you might be taking the place of valuable external linked spidering that would really value your position on google.

Of course i am talking about pages with a reasonable amount of relevant content. if you have a small site that will get a couple of dozen visits a day, then of course it's better to inform google as quick as possible about your content as you will have to wait an eternity otherwise.

Besides this there is still another problem with google sitemaps: they are not reliable. If you check your pages on google on a daily basis you will notice that you can go from 10000 pages on one day to 100 pages the day after, for no reason. You may get your 10000 pages back the week after, or even the day after, but you will lose al ot of visitors that pointed their interest to some other similar site.

Smartys wrote:

As a sidenote i should mention that i laugh like crazzy a few months ago when the web out there found out that deleting the google sitemap from their sites would give them an immediate gain on the number of indexed pages.

I hadn't heard that mentioned anywhere: where did you hear it? smile

It was not mentioned on the press. But it was a lot of talk about in discussions like this one. Check out some webmasters and SEO communities ou there and search for 'google sitemap'. I remember it was a big fuzz on  digitalpoint forums as i ocasionaly check those forums, but it was talked about all over the web.
I don't have the habit of reading blogs, but i am sure there was people talk about it. If you go through these blog articles you can quickly find some google sitemap downsides exposed.

If you red the page you point carefully it mentions the forum lo-fi version as a non-malicious situation of duplicate content. It also say's the in those cases the spider tries topick the best version. I wonder what do they mean by "the best"...
If you read a bit further, this becomes an issue when content start to be duplicated across the domain's domain ( domain domain??? big_smile )

Also, what google says it's basically an utopia. They try to convince the world that they have control over what's spam, or duplicated content, but in fact they don't.

If yout don't believe me test it yourself. Test both solutions: a sitemap and a completely mod_rewritten site. The second one might take a while longer to get indexed but it will completely beat the first one when it comes to show up on top of google. I don't care so much about google sitemaps nor even page ranks. What matters to me is how much traffic i get from google, and i get a lot.

As a sidenote i should mention that i laugh like crazzy a few months ago when the web out there found out that deleting the google sitemap from their sites would give them an immediate gain on the number of indexed pages.

My advice is: don't trust google blabla and go for the old techniques.

This is an open surce project, if anybody feels like adding 'proper' regex filtering in the robots.txt, i even encourage it.

I don't think that's an issue. Vbulletin and invision have a low-fi version and that's the one that is iindexed by google all the time. I guess that's because of the fancy urls.
I don't think google will pull your page rank down because of duplicated content.

Ok, but there's something i should say about the example link: in my site i pointed the links to the printable dopic version instead. The reason why i did that is because i have ads on those that i don't mind to show to those who come from google. On the other hand i want my regular users to browse a clean ads-free forum.
But, if you download this mod as it is it these alternative simplistic pages will point to your actual topic pages. Which means you won't have duplicated content.
Valid xhtml and meaningful fancy urls, how cool is that?

Since i've been using this for a while it's actually a good time to share the results whith you guys.
This worked, my site gets indexede by google everyday. The non-fancy urls gets indexed first while the fancy one takes a while, but once it gets indexed to it brings a lot of visits from google. Pretty much every topic titile of my site gets to the top of google. So this thing really worked big_smile

Ok, my hosting provider does not allow my to send that many emails within an hour.
I am just about to use gmail smtp. My forums have 4000+ users, it doesnt sound reasonable at all to send that many emails at a time. Has anybody heard about google's atitude twards this kind of usage?

Or should i just use it and not worry?

157

(1 replies, posted in Programming)

Ok... using the dump() function cause me some real trouble... until i found out that that that was the casue of my problems.

The problem is that it has an "exit" that prevents some post code execution that might be useful.

I wrote this code:
http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15830

and out of nowhere it output an incomplete page, i couldnt figure out why. Today i restarted writing the script and the same hapened. This time i just wrote a line of code before i refresh, fortunatly.

that was werd so i tryed a print_r() instead... the layout showed properly.

This is a super small detail, but, unless there is some reason i don't know about, i would suggest thar line to be removed.

thank you janson

ok... i was not specific enough.
In which variable?

BTW, what was that array that had a lot of useful stuff?

I tried for a couple of minutes and i couldnt find it.

mmm... at firt it sounds cool, but i wouldn't like to be in your shoes when you decide to update you punbb installation.

I as very calmly writing my plugin when, at some point, i refreshed the page and suddenly  the html head was gone and the page displayed the contend without any styling.

I tried to find out if i accidentally deleted a line of code or something but aparently everything looks normal in my code...

here's what i wrote so far, please let me know if you found the error.

<?php
/***********************************************************************

  Copyright (C) 2002-2005  Rickard Andersson (rickard@punbb.org)

  This file is part of PunBB.

  PunBB is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
  under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
  by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,
  or (at your option) any later version.

  PunBB is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
  MA  02111-1307  USA

************************************************************************/

##
##
##  A few notes of interest for aspiring plugin authors:
##
##  1. If you want to display a message via the message() function, you
##     must do so before calling generate_admin_menu($plugin).
##
##  2. Plugins are loaded by admin_loader.php and must not be
##     terminated (e.g. by calling exit()). After the plugin script has
##     finished, the loader script displays the footer, so don't worry
##     about that. Please note that terminating a plugin by calling
##     message() or redirect() is fine though.
##
##  3. The action attribute of any and all <form> tags and the target
##     URL for the redirect() function must be set to the value of
##     $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']. This URL can however be extended to
##     include extra variables (like the addition of &foo=bar in
##     the form of this example plugin).
##
##  4. If your plugin is for administrators only, the filename must
##     have the prefix "AP_". If it is for both administrators and
##     moderators, use the prefix "AMP_". This example plugin has the
##     prefix "AMP_" and is therefore available for both admins and
##     moderators in the navigation menu.
##
##  5. Use _ instead of spaces in the file name.
##
##  6. Since plugin scripts are included from the PunBB script
##     admin_loader.php, you have access to all PunBB functions and
##     global variables (e.g. $db, $pun_config, $pun_user etc).
##
##  7. Do your best to keep the look and feel of your plugins' user
##     interface similar to the rest of the admin scripts. Feel free to
##     borrow markup and code from the admin scripts to use in your
##     plugins. If you create your own styles they need to be added to
##     the "base_admin" style sheet.
##
##  8. Plugins must be released under the GNU General Public License or
##     a GPL compatible license. Copy the GPL preamble at the top of
##     this file into your plugin script and alter the copyright notice
##     to refrect the author of the plugin (i.e. you).
##
##


// Make sure no one attempts to run this script "directly"
if (!defined('PUN'))
    exit;

// Tell admin_loader.php that this is indeed a plugin and that it is loaded
define('PUN_PLUGIN_LOADED', 1);

$filestring = file_get_contents("plugins/topiclists.txt");
$ids_forum_post = unserialize($filestring);


if (empty($ids_forum_post)){
    
    $query = "SELECT ".$db->prefix."forums.id, ".$db->prefix."forums.forum_name, ".$db->prefix."topics.subject, ".$db->prefix."posts.id FROM ".$db->prefix."forums, ".$db->prefix."topics, ".$db->prefix."posts WHERE ".$db->prefix."posts.id=$postid AND ".$db->prefix."forums.id=$forumid AND ".$db->prefix."posts.topic_id=".$db->prefix."topics.id";
    $result = $db->query($query);
    
    $list = $db->fetch_assoc($result);


}
    
    // Display the admin navigation menu
    generate_admin_menu($plugin);

?>
    <div id="exampleplugin" class="blockform">
        <h2><span>Topic list plugin</span></h2>
        <div class="box">
            <div class="inbox">
            <p>This plugin allows you to create topiclists by defining the forum you want to create a list of and the topic where the list should go. The topic must exist already. </p><p>PLEASE NOTE:All cotent in the topic will replaced by the new topiclist.</p>
            <p>
            <?php
            dump($list,$ids_forum_post);
            echo $query;
            
            
            ?>
            </p>
            </div>
        </div>

        <h2 class="block2"><span>Topic Lists</span></h2>
        <div class="box">
            <fieldset>
                <legend>Current topic lists</legend>
                <div class="infldset">
                    <table class="aligntop" cellspacing="0">
                        <tr>
                            <th scope="row">Forum</th>
                            <th scope="row">Topic</th>
                        </tr>
                    </table>
                </div>
            </fieldset>
            
            <form id="example" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ?>&foo=bar">
                <div class="inform">
                    <fieldset>
                        <legend>Create a new Topiclist</legend>
                        <div class="infldset">
                        <table class="aligntop" cellspacing="0">
                            <tr>
                                <th scope="row">Forum ID:</th>
                                <td>
                                    <input type="text" name="forum_id_tolist" size="10" tabindex="1" />
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <th scope="row">Post ID:</th>
                                <td>
                                    <input type="text" name="post_id_tolist" size="10" tabindex="2" />
                                </td>
                            </tr>
                            <tr>
                                <th scope="row"><input type="submit" name="newlist" value="create" tabindex="3" /></th>
                                
                            </tr>
                        </table>
                        </div>
                    </fieldset>
                </div>
            </form>
        </div>
    </div>
<?php


// Note that the script just ends here. The footer will be included by admin_loader.php.

The query is not fetching anything yet, i got interrupted when i was fetching values to put into it.

163

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

I have no experience in javascript debugging.
I use firefox error console, but thats kind of unpractical. What console and/or other debuggind tools would you recomend me?

164

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

Ok... i don't know how to use quotes in js, if i can escpae them, if single quotes is the same as double quotes, etc

None of these work, the second one for obvious reasons.

<a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('checkboxes').style.display = 'none';">hide checkboxes</a>
<a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('checkboxes').style.display = "none";">hide checkboxes</a>

165

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

elbekko wrote:

I already fixed it, it was due to 1&1 being noob and splitting his databases over different servers with different users.

yikes

allow me the OT, that souds creepy.
Just to avoid similar troubles, how did you figure that out?

166

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

Ok... I created a toggle ( visible/invisible ) function i want to use in a few elements on a page, how do i set some elements invisible from the beggining?

167

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

mmmm... some misconfig with the prefix.
Send it back to elbeko ( or me smile ) so he can fix it.

168

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

thank you

169

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

Ok, i don't speak HTML, javascript, css and all those things... only the basics

I am a bit out of space in some page in my site.
I thought i could use ajax to remove a div from the page and insert another one. The reason why i want to remove the first one is because they overlay.
This  ajax library appears to be pretty simple to use (I am fluent in php).
Just before i start writing any code... this is perfectly possible without any major tricks right?

170

(9 replies, posted in Programming)

mmmmm... what help do you need?
If the passowrds are hashed both whith md5 it should't be more necessary anything else than querying all ids, usernames, pass, registrationdate, etc from your e107 database and inserting it on you punbb one.
I'd use php.

171

(19 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)

Rickard wrote:

It's difficult to say without doing some tests. Does the page just take long to load or does PunBB report long page generation times if you enabled DEBUG mode?

Ops... didn't saw this last reply the last time.
The pages are loading a bit slow. My forums have like 6 to 12 people online usually.

Sometime ago y database got locked... i didnt figure out how to unlock a sqlite database so i just

$cp mydb mydb.bak
$rm mydb
$cp mydb.bak mydb
$rm mydb.bak

Probably query got lost, i am still trying to figure out what made the database locked. The file permissions were ok.

172

(0 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting)

This is keeping my forum down sad

I wonder how did it got locked...

Anyway, how do i unlock it?

This has been talked, i think that would do it for my case. I am getting a spam post a day.

I can go and hack the code myself, i am open to suggestions...
I don't know the structure of punbb that well.. should this be checked in the parser ( which parser function then ) , in the postmessage functions ( how is it called ) ?... etc etc etc...

174

(12 replies, posted in Programming)

thank you smile

175

(12 replies, posted in Programming)

any tips on how to perform a sqlite dump?