This is the title to your page. You need to remove it from your Vbulletin admin cp. It will display whatever is between the <title></title> tags.

Yeah, I had a brain cramp in not realizing the function where the hook is might be called multiple times per instance. Since this was not a code edit, I forgot that the hook could be eval'd more than once.

That should all be fixed now.

Keeping allow_url_fopen off in mind, using fopen() might not be the best choice ...

If you don't want to use cUrl for one or another reason, what about fsockopen()?
Also, I'd prefer not to waste resources for local URLS (eg. showthread, etc.)
Would be nice if those were detected automatically and the titles retrieved directly rather than forking a new vBulletin instance just to get the title :)

nice, I didn't know there was a hack for this at the Org :D

Thanks for sharing, I'll install for a client later I'm sure.

Thanks for the great Hack.

Clicked Installed :)

Your welcome. :)

That might not be a bad idea. I could definitely craft it with fsockopen. So far, nobody has reported any issue with fopen as of yet. If it becomes one, I will take your advice.

As for the local links. I see your point. If I get some time next week, I might poke around with that.

I would like to thank all of you who have donated to me so far. It is appreciated!

It should also be noted, that changing safe mode should not be required as with a similar hack. Many hosts require safe mode.

nice hack, installed :) thank you

nice hack!
My forum ist devided in two parts: One can be seen by registered and unregistered and the other one can only be seen by registered users.
A link to a thread in the area that can only be seen by registered is not replaced correctly. It seems, that the server calls the thread as "unregistered" to find the title tag. How can I tell him, that he should look for the title as a registered user?

Hope you understand my problem!
Greetings from Germany!

The problem is that the page is not open to the public. It will only show the page title of that page. If it was to grab the page title of pages that you must be registered to view, then it would take away from security of making the thread hidden to unregistered users.

really nice hack ;)

Thanks!

yes I understand the problem. But the unregistered users see the threadtitle anyway. They can see the forum, the threads, but they cannot read the threads.

Perhaps I do not understand the nature of the issue. Could you PM me links illustrating what you are talking about?

The mod needs to be able to see the page title tag, if it cannot, then it will not display the page title.

I saw this modification on another forum. I'm glad I was able to find it. Installed :D

Glad it worked out! :)

Your very welcome. :)

excellent - thanks!

You welcome, and don't forget to vote. :)

I should remind everyone seeing as how there twice as many downloads as there are installs:

If anyone notices any issues with foreign characters let me know. I think I compensated for it, but please tell me if a problem arises.

Please help me, I removed the title from my vB Admin cP, but still it will only display the Forum name instead of displaying theThread name :( .

(please note the I have vBSEO installed, and don't know if it's affecting it!)

Thanx in advance :) .

Does the thread require the user to be logged in to see it?

Yes :o but even when I sign in it doesn't show !!!

I installed the mod but it doesn't seem to change anything when I post a url... maybe I misunderstand the purpose of this mod?

Does it take a string of text in the shape of a url like http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ and change it to the title of that page? (i.e. Apple - Mac OS X Leopard)

Yes, that is what it does..

Nice idea, but I had to uninstall it after I downloaded and installed because I can't use fopen. I hadn't gotten to the post about fopen before I downloaded and installed it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have tried it. Just wanted to explain one download without a marked install.

I had to go with the other plugin because it used cURL and that is what my host, Dreamhost, allows.

OK, Just note the security issues I brought up with that plugin.

Thanks for the link to your post above.

If yours was able to use fopen or cURL so that both avenues worked, I'd give yours the install. But as it stands with my host, plugins that only use fopen will not work for me.

I'll keep an eye on this incase you do decide to add in cURL support in addition to fopen.

The problem with cURL is you cannot tell the script to get X bytes of data and then stop, which you can with fopen. So basically if someone types in a URL to say a 7gb file, your server will attempt to download that entire file before parsing it to get the title tag. Most likely, your server will timeout after 30 seconds (if that is the setting in php.ini) or if it goes above the memory limit.

This could adversely affect your servers performance, and may also greatly increase your bandwidth usage. You should be VERY wary if that plugin works with shoutbox. Someone could easily do a denial of service attack on you relatively quick.

Somebody correct me if im wrong..

but this hack should be good for seo'ing right? as it rewrites the urls?

No, it doesn't rewrite the URLs. What it does is add anchor text to the URL.

This might help with SEO for your forum if the link points to one of your threads. Otherwise, the page at the end of the link may benefit. In both cases, I say "might" and "may" because it depends on the title of the page or thread to which the link is pointing - for many forums, the thread title is often pretty much useless for SEO (e.g., "Hi... I'm new here" isn't likely to rocket that thread to the top of the search engine rankings for anything useful to the forum owner, which is one - but only one - of the problems with trying to use mod_rewrite strategies with vBulletin).

:)

eitherway it benefits! So by anchoring it bots will identify the "text" first and will index it into search engines with the link, right? So when people search for "Basket Nitting" and that was anchored on the forum linking to your own forum then its a good thing..?

Not necessarily. I was editing my post above as you were replying:

In those cases, it's not going to help you much if at all. How many people are going to search for ""Hi... I'm new here" or "I have a problem" or "it doesn't work"?

I highly doubt Google even credits links/anchor text in forum posts. You have to understand that Google passes PageRank and credit for "votes". Forum links could easily be posted by the site owner in the 1000's. Google and it's army of the Worlds best geeks are not that silly.

Even it does, most forum threads have no, or very little PR.

If you use this hack expecting some boost of some sort, you will be dissapointed. If you use this hack for your users, you wont be.

They do show up in Google Alerts. That would seem to indicate that Google does recognize them as incoming links.

If a thread is indexed, and has at leasr one icnoming link, it should follow that it has some PR, no matter how small. One link in a thread wouldn't be worht much. A lot of similar links could have some impact.

Always true. :)

To weigh in here, I wouldn't think it would affect SEO that much, other than it may put keywords into the threads/posts that were not there before..