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..