Redirection when changing your forums-folder

Everyone knows the problem: If you want to change the structure of your site and especially change the forums-folder, you would loose all clicks from google or other search-engines. Setting up a 404-page could only redirect the users to the main-page. These small scripts have the same names as the main-pages of vbulletin. You can set them in your old forums-folder and they will redirect the users to the right postings or subforums. The scripts supports both links from vB 2.x and vB 3.x. I am pretty sorry, that I can only select one version of vB here But that's life

You don't need to edit any files of your vB-installation. Just place these files in your old forums-folder and please edit config.inc.php - There you can enter:

• Siteowner
• Newdirectory
• And if you would like to use a different domain - just in case
• New in version 2.0.0: Language support
• New in version 2.0.0: Choose the method for redirecting
• New in version 2.0.0: Statisticfunction
• New in version 2.0.0: Choose the path to the homepage-script
• New in version 2.0.0: X-HTML 1.0 Strict valid

It supports passing on links from:

• index.php
• forumdisplay.php
• member.php
• showthread.php

Supports these versions:

• vb 2.x
• vb 3.0.x
• vb 3.5.x
• vb 3.6.x

Supported languages (right now):

• Englisch
• German (Du)
• German (Sie)

The script takes its own domain, if you don't define it otherwise - and is pretty flexible.

If you find any bugs, pass them on. And if you have any questions, post them here

Version 2.0.0 can be considered a comple rewrite. All bugs from the earlier version 1.0.0 have been eliminated. A documentation in english and german has been added.

If you want to contribute more languages, please be free to do so, I will add them to the main project as soon as they appear

[Owen]

Wow cool hack, problem is I used invision board before I installed vbulletin -___-

[Bernd Glasstett]

I never used an invision-board, but there are two ifs:

• if you can tell me, what filenames they used
• and if you are sure, that the threadids are the same on the invision-board and on the vB

I can add support for this too

[gmarik]

nice one, test it later ...

[MrNase]

ah Bernd, this just comes to late.

i lost my 1st position on the google rank when i switched from /v2 to /

But great work, it will surely help people to prevent that in future

[Sebastian]

this is ok if you do not have htaccess support on your server. otherwise all you have to do is:

RewriteRule ^old_dir /new_dir [R=301,L]

.. and all the urls will be pointed to the correct place.

[Bernd Glasstett]

true Sebastian, but rewrite_mod has to be compiled with Apache in order to do so, which is no standard.

[rooshine]

Thanks very much for creating this. It does not seem to be working correctly for me. It forwards users to the correct directory, but it is stripping off the last part of the url. For example, if the url is "/oldDirectory/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=3", it will forward to "/newDirectory/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=" without the "3". Any ideas?

Thanks.

[rooshine]

Sorry for the double post, but I found a bug.

In the config.inc.php file there is a variable called $newdirectory

In the other pages it is referred to as $new_directory

I changed the config.inc.php variable to $new_directory and that seemed to work. It still does not fix the problem I mentioned above.

[mightyhitter]

yeah..change the variable in config to new_directory and replace all the _POST with _GET in other files. it helpful.