After many months of slow progress on Affearners (My Affiliate forum) I have decided tonight to pull the plug.

Over the past few months the amount of decent posts has dwindled to a few a week and the work involved in moderating the forum and cleaning out the spam has been distracting me from the real task of building my new business

So with sadness I have pulled the site

Honestly if you are a user of Xrumer for forum spamming then please try to use your brain a little.

I am completely ok with the numbers game that is forum spam and that you have to try to throw as much out as cheaply as possible on the knowledge that some will stick however please try at least and do some quality control.

When doing a mass run of link spamming I would suggest that investing the time in checking what has stuck is probably a good idea before you repeat the same run again. If nothing else it tells you whats working and whats not.

Heres a snapshot of my inbox from 10 minutes ago…

Honestly these are all fake Xrumer members looking to spam Affearners. You cant do it.. I dont approve you and even if I do the site is spam tollerant. You cant drop forum profile links, they dont count. You cant drop links in posts as it gets removed automatically by my scripting.

All you are doing is showing me you dont know what your doing

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: -

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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: -

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: -

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.