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SMF theme to look like Beast

SEOidiot — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:00:06 +0000

I did a little bit of work on my Affiliate tips forum Affearners today to give the theme a bit of work.

I dont know if your like me but I am starting to think that most of the forums I go to all look a little confusing and loud. I have toyed with the idea of taking the whole thing over to a forum like Beast but I am not happy that its good enough from a features perspective yet.

So in the meantime I have stripped out most of the colour and made the whole thing look more minamalist. Let me know what you think.

Next on the agenda we will be adding a way to see the ‘Best of Affearners’ and ill post the code I wrote for that. Then soon after we will be adding some conditional stuff to try to increase signups from guest users.

Post from: SEOidiot

SMF theme to look like Beast

SEO makes you fat

SEOidiot — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:27:36 +0000

Many people who have met me will testify to the fact that I could do with losing a few pounds (I expect that MickG, PaulH, DaveN, Pilky, Esrun, TheKaptain and VSloathe and many others will all now be reading the rest of this with a smile and some enthusiasm at the thought of more ammo for taking the piss, I give as good as I get though! – Im not linking you lot as youll have to find this yourselves )

So in the past month or so I have taken on the task of running to get rid of some of that excess baggage. I started last month at the top end of 13stone (If your a yank use Google to work out that just in pounds or learn that our way is better) and so far I have lost about 8 pounds, that included a weeks holiday so im happy so far although id like to get down to 12 stone 3 pounds – Top end of ideal for my height.

Spending all day and night in front of a macbook isnt the ideal way to keep slim and I reckon like most of IT most SEO’s could lose a bit of weight.

Being the gadget freak and geek that I am I needed a way to geek up the task so I would keep at it and therefore I am using: -

iPod Nano 8gb

Nike+ with a little adapter to fit onto the laces of my trainers

Some decent old skool house tracks from ‘94 (Urban Cookie Collective anyone?)

Then I have been setting myself challenges on Nike+ to get me running, I do plodding slow 2 mile runs at the moment along Blackpool prom.

Its a nice run, fresh wind, sunset on my left and the bright lights of Blackpool and the piers ahead.

So anyone else looking to get some weight off? Love to do some challenges with a few people on Nike+, I can take the abuse – See comments that will get posted for examples of that

The great thing about Nike+ is that you get to set challenges like first to 20miles with other users anywhere in the world and as you sync your data you can see the progress of everyone taking part (And yes you can abuse them via comments each time you check!)

Let the comment abuse begin!

Post from: SEOidiot

SEO makes you fat

Affearners Hacked!

SEOidiot — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:56:31 +0000

Well off I go for the only vacation I get each year and a day or two into the trip, some time on the evening when we were having a nice stroll here one evening

Some guys decided it would be amusing to hack the forum and replace me as Admin. I actually first got to see it when I checked my email from Goonhilly but only managed to get a good enough connection last night to get it all sorted out.

They did some messing with the database, categories and the settings.php file. All via their admin status so it wasnt too hard to sort out really.

UPDATE:
Looks like they have had more fun than I first thought and we may have to do a complete restore from the sql backup to get the site back to what it should be, it also looks like they did this over a longer period than I first thought so its even more messy Oh joy

Upgrade SMF time again YAWN…..

Post from: SEOidiot

Affearners Hacked!

Solving forum profile spam

SEOidiot — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:43:01 +0000

In my previous posts we solved the crappy 404 in SMF and sorted off site links so they didnt harm us, ohh and tweaked the post page to have slightly better on page SEO (Slightly….)

One last thing to change and a story of why I changed it.

I have been looking to build the forum and community at Affearners (My affiliate forum) and so have chosen to let anyone register even if they have a username like greg123hhgxnbv and an email like spam123444@hgsdhgs23.cn

I have a reasonable appreciation for spam techniques as you may know so was aware of the risks of this policy so kept a close eye on it all for a while.

Shortly after allowing lots of people in I noticed Affearners was mentioned on a forum elsewhere. Its a Polish spammers forum and good old Google translate showed me that the user was pointing out a link to some crappy pharma affiliate where the link he had placed was on his forum profile at Affearners.

This link at the time counted as a proper link (I had my reasons) so now seemed a good time to sort that out.

To do this we will simply no follow all our profile links, on with the fun!

Open up profile.template.php in your forums current theme and search out this line

', $context['member']['website']['title'], '

Simply change it to this

', $context['member']['website']['title'], '

Job done, now all profile links are much more useless to the spammer.

Isnt spam knowledge a good thing for general webmastering?

Post from: SEOidiot

Solving forum profile spam

How to stop forum link spam on SMF

SEOidiot — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:41:31 +0000

I have had a few problems with people dropping links in their posts or signatures over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners so I decided to check a few of them out.

One really nasty one went to the sort of porn that nobody should be interested in and we also had one that went to a site that tried to install some malware on my computer. So enough is enough, had a chat to a few people to run some ideas around (Thanks to JasonD and Perk in particular) and came up with the following plan: -

All links going off site would be intercepted and run through a jumper page to check the link out first.
Any links that were tagged as approved would then pass on and work as normal.
Any links that hadnt been approved would simply be displayed on a page for people who really wanted to go to them to copy and paste into their browser and leave.

So how to do all this on SMF?

Intercepting the links
SMF uses BBCode to make life easier for people to post links in the forum, this meant that we could utilise their hard work to change all the links and add the following to the front of all links off site -

http://www.affearners.com/forum/outgoing/go.php?link=www.thelinktobechecked.com

Where the link to be checked could then be analysed against the list of pre-approved links.

To do this I changed many instances of the [URL] replacement in subs.php within the sources folder in SMF. Heres what my finished subs.php looks like now: -

Subs

To use this just find and replace all instances of http://www.affearners.com/forum/outgoing/go.php?link= with your own script location

*NB If you mess up your own forum thats your own fault!

So that was making all links off site head off to our checking script.

This script simply checks the links people have posted against an array of approved links and if they are approved redirects back out (302 ) but if they arent shows this page for the user to copy and paste the link themselves: -

And the code that runs that is as follows: -

http://pastie.org/244003

This simply checks against our array (took most of the sites out to make it cleaner to show) and if they match jumps onto the site in question. If not we get the page displayed for unapproved links.

Notice I do some chopping off of the http:// part to check and probably should do some url encoding etc.

Pretty simplistic I know but solves a good deal of the issues. In the future ill DB the approval part of the links and add the ability for anyone logged in as admin to approve a link on page.

If you liked this you might also be interested in making friendly 404’s for SMF or making SMF more SEO friendly.

Next ill show you how to solve the profile spam issues

Post from: SEOidiot

How to stop forum link spam on SMF

Friendly 404 page for SMF Forums

SEOidiot — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:44:49 +0000

One of the other issues I needed to sort out when I bought My Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners was to sort out the wierd 404 the site was serving.

As you will know a 404 is served when the page doesnt exist but for some reason when I took over the forum it was trying to send these requests through to a page called 404.shtml and looping it round and round… Not great really.

So to sort that I decided I would implement a more friendly 404 page. To do this I opened up the .htaccess file in the root of the domain (If you dont already have a .htaccess file there just create a file with that as the name – yes it does start with a . and no file extension!)

In that .htaccess file we add this line: -

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.affearners.com/404-error-page.php

Obviously you would change that domain to your own (Dont send me your 404 errors!)

This then allows me to create a nicer more friendly page to show people that the file didnt exist rather than simply returning a 404 error to the browser.

This is what that page looks like: -

This looks a bit better I think.

One last thing, you still have to make sure that this friendly page issues a 404 header to the search bots or you will just be serving a lot of duplicate pages for no reason!

Heres how you do that with PHP: -

< ?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?>

This has to go at the top of the page before anything outputs to the browser.

Hope that helps!

Post from: SEOidiot

Friendly 404 page for SMF Forums

SEO Roadshow – Booked at last

SEOidiot — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:32:28 +0000

I have been delaying my booking to go to SEO Roadshow in Limerick this year mainly to annoy certain people but so as to annoy them even more I am actually going!

The hotel looks great, not sure they know whats coming!

I also have to say that the booking experience on Ryanair’s site was awful, im glad they are cheap or only an idiot would book with them.

Now that its all booked (arrive 10th sod off back 12th) the following people owe me beer: -

Ekky (Same again this season mate?)

Esrun

The Kaptain

Perk & Mary (1 each please)

Paul H (Not sure why but its worth a try)

Drew (I think he actually does!)

Mick Gammage (For adding that shit link >)

But I am more than happy to accept one from anyone else.:)

See you there!

Post from: SEOidiot

SEO Roadshow – Booked at last

SEO for SMF Forums, Some simple hacks

SEOidiot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:32:52 +0000

I have been doing some work over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum, Affearners. Minor tweaks really but I felt that they could be useful to anyone else with an SMF powered forum.

I would really like to spend some time ripping the whole thing to pieces as its all table driven and the code looks like someone threw it up, but instead of that mammoth task I did the lazy thing and tweaked it to get some benefits.

First off Affearners uses the SEO package created by Earl over at Syndk8 and I inherited that when I bought the forum. In my opinion it does a decent job of sorting the URL’s out but has some issues that perhaps newer packages dont (I dont wanna go through a complete URL migration so sod it it will do).

So first thing to sort is that the post pages dont even have a decent H1 title, so that should be easy to sort…

Open up dispaly.template.php (in your current forums theme folder) and change the following line: -
', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], ' (', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')

And replace it with the following: -



', $context['subject'], '

Thats gotten rid of the crap we didn’t need in there and made the page title a nice H1.

Next the formatting may be a bit crappy for your forum so we may have to alter the CSS to sort that out. Heres what I did, open up style.css (Same folder as display.template above) and add this to the end of the stylesheet: -


/* seo hacks etc */
#top_subject h1 {

font-size: 16px;

line-height: 18px;

color: #ffffff;}

That just makes the title big but still fits in nice even if people do long stupid titles (Like I tend to )

Thats it really, simple change really but I feel a lot happier about the what each page is saying about itself.

Post from: SEOidiot

SEO for SMF Forums, Some simple hacks

I know its not quite what you want Dave but…

SEOidiot — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:29:28 +0000

I know you love campers Dave, and this one Mr Naylor is cheap and for sale near me.

Seeing as how the Youtube vid didnt work heres a crappy screencap

Not quite the right thing but I still kinda like it

Post from: SEOidiot

I know its not quite what you want Dave but…

Whoops Syndk8 Hacked…

SEOidiot — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:49:54 +0000

Earl is having a bad night, someone hacked Syndk8 and heres all we see now: -

DONT PANIC!!!

Post from: SEOidiot

Whoops Syndk8 Hacked…