[eva2000]

Originally Posted by buro9

OK, this is for eva2000 and then I'll go through what I'm doing to keep all my links lovely

In your forum directory, set up your .htaccess to contain the following:

RewriteRule ^f([0-9]+)\/s$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)\/s\.html$ forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [R=301]

Let me explain each part of those rules... well... one of them:

RewriteRule ARG1 ARG2 ARG3= If the URL requested matches the first arg, perform the second arg accord to the rules of the final arg.

ARG1 = Regular expression to match. In our case, ^f([0-9+])\/s$ where ^ = start of line, ([0-9]+ ) = 1 or more numbers, \/ = escaped forward slash (has to be escaped within a regexp), $ = end of line.

ARG2 = URL to request instead. In our case we also include $1 which is the first matching part of the regexp in ARG1 which is the number... the forumId.

ARG3 = Rule to dictate how to handle the ARG2 URL... [L] would bring it inline (leave the browser URL as it is and force the URL to the output stream without redirect)... I'm using [R=301] which is to send back a http 301 error which is "Moved Permanently"... I do this as I want Google and search engines to update all of their links over time and quite hitting the legacy ones.

So that's your solution eva Though do bug me if I screwed that up... I've only just finally got round to it... and the 301 error may require a fully qualified URL and not a relative one.



Anyhow... this is now to help the people who are NOT upgrading their VB2 but, are doing a fresh install of VB3 at a new URL and are archiving their VB2. I'm not sure how many of these there will be... but our forum quite enjoys the zest of occassional re-births... and it will help to ensure that our VB3 threads are truly threaded from day 1.

So... I've got this URL at the moment:

http://www.bowlie.com/forum/

And I'm moving that forum to:

http://www.bowlie.com/2003/

And putting VB3 on the /forum/ URL.

Yes I have lots of VB licenses

Anyhow... I want all t*.html links to go through to the archived forum... to keep all of the search engine results valid.

And I want all of the f*.html links to go through to the new forums on the new board.

The threads are easy to map:

	#
	# Legacy thread redirects
	#
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)\.html$ http://www.bowlie.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ http://www.bowlie.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=$1&perpage=$2&pagenumber=$3 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^t([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)--(.*)--([0-9]+)\.html$ http://www.bowlie.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=$1&perpage=$2&highlight=$3&pagenumber=$4 [R=301]

But the forums are harder.

The forumid's on both the old and new sites are different... so what was forumid = 4 on VB2 is now forumid = 11 on VB3. So I need a map to track these and then set up all of the RewriteRules.

I've created a javascript array of the forumids... where the first value is the VB2 forumid, and the second value is the VB3 forumid.

Some forums won't exist on my VB3 site... so those links will go through to the archive too.

I've then created a simple bit of JavaScript which when run from Internet Explorer (doesn't work in Mozilla as that is standards compliant ) will produce my rewriterules for me:

<script type="text/javascript">
var forums = new Array(
  new Array('16','21'),
  new Array('17','22'),
  new Array('29',''),
  new Array('33','29'),
  new Array('4','11'),
  new Array('30',''),
  new Array('27','')
);

var html = "";

var oldForumUrl = "http://www.bowlie.com/2001/";
var newForumUrl = "http://www.bowlie.com/forum/";

for (var ii = 0; ii < forums.length; ii++) {
  if (forums[ii][1] == '') {
    // Link to archive
		html += "RewriteRule ^f" + forums[ii][0] + "\\.html$ " + oldForumUrl + "forumdisplay.php?f=" + forums[ii][0] + " [R=301]\n";
    html += "RewriteRule ^f" + forums[ii][0] + "--.*\\.html$ " + oldForumUrl + "forumdisplay.php?f=" + forums[ii][0] + " [R=301]\n";
  } else {
    // Link to new
		html += "RewriteRule ^f" + forums[ii][0] + "\\.html$ " + newForumUrl + "forumdisplay.php?f=" + forums[ii][1] + " [R=301]\n";
    html += "RewriteRule ^f" + forums[ii][0] + "--.*\\.html$ " + newForumUrl + "forumdisplay.php?f=" + forums[ii][1] + " [R=301]\n";
  }
}

document.write("<plaintext>" + html);

</script>

Obviously modify the URLs as applicable to you.

The output can then be pasted into your .htaccess and you will have:

Legacy forum URLs for forums that exist on your new VB going to VB3
Legacy forum URLs for forums that don't exist on your new VB going to VB2
Legacy thread URLs going to your VB2

Google would start spidering your new VB3 links pretty soon, including the new thread ones.

Now... if all of that went straight over your head... just ignore it and don't do any of it It's there to help other users that like me have installed this hack widely, indexed heavily by Google and are choosing to have a fresh VB3 and archive their VB2... that may be no-one else here... in which case... ignore this

thanks buro9, sorry for the late reply my forum's server was down due to hardware failure since Jan 31