Board Optimization - Google WMT friendly 404 Search mod

Hi there!

The folowing mod will enable you to setup a true 404 page while displaying the search page with a customizable message to your users.

Installation instructions for vBSEO users:

1. Import the attached XML product
2. Include the folowing tag in your search template called search_forums where you want to display the 404 message:
   

   <!-- 404message -->

3. Upload 404.php to your forum root
4. Sign in to your vBSEO adminpanel and edit your 404 page settings with the folowing configuration:
   Attachment 64442

Installation instructions for non-vBSEO users:

1. Import the attached XML product
2. Include the folowing tag in your search template called search_forums where you want to display the 404 message:
   

   <!-- 404message -->

3. Upload 404.php to your forum root
4. Edit your htaccess page and add the folowing code:
   

   RewriteEngine On

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.+)$ 404.php

Requirements: PHP Curl

The template to edit for the custom message on the searchpage is search_forums_404

A demo can be found on http://www.vbcash.com/blablabla.html

Have Fun!
Jan Jaap

[Icyeb]

nice work, got it installed on 3.6.7pl1 without any major problem except the logged out problem. is there a way to redirect users to the homepage instead of showing the search page

[tokenyank]

cookie isn't persistant...

If logged in member puts in bad url, delivers search page with 404 but also delivers page as though they aren't logged in.

As an aside, I edited .htaccess in domain root to:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /home/YOURINFO/public_html/YOURFORUMDIRECTORY/404.php

This also provides custom 404's domain wide. This is still parsing as a guest though too.

If the cookie issue can't be fixed, I'll have to uninstall... Hopefully there's a fix!

[tokenyank]

ooops!

Umm... A friendly pointer!

If you've just gutted your site and took 3 years of content down and made your forums the 'ONLY' content on your site... Putting a custom 404 into your search.php may not be a good idea when you have around 300 spiders all hitting it at the same time.

Server load spiked to 9 and brought down httpd.

A server reboot and hack uninstall later, all fine again! Looks like I'm stuck using normal ol' shtml 404's!