Tours and holidays in Australia

Forums on the Internet are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is quite understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication of visitors. A forum is a great way to build a community on your site and build a loyal audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to review forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is the topic of a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine for yourself the following points:

1. What kind of forum functionality do you need. Most forum engines have a wide range of features, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and get acquainted with the detailed description of the functionality.

2. Paid or free engine - this point must also be taken into account. In this review, there are only two paid engines - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. The development of the community - when the engine has a developed community in both the English and Russian Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design patterns. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many points will have to be solved on your own.

4. The date of the last update of the engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers do not develop it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, enough big words 🙂. I'll start with the most popular forum engines based on this CMS ranking.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my Planet Photoshop forum on this engine. The reason is not only that this is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in Runet, so many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of user, moderator, administrator actions, fine-tuning of moderator and administrator access rights, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just some of the phpBB functionality.

I also really like the direction in which phpBB is developing from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both the administrator, moderators and ordinary users.

My opinion after several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that is not demanding on hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.

Useful phpBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in Runet. It hosts many well-known forums. It has developed communities in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet.

There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of search robots.

Useful sites on Invision Power Board:

vBulletin is a great forum engine. It is paid, you can find out the cost. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Support for podcasting, automatic generation of forum RSS feed, the ability for visitors to create social groups and interest clubs on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion.

punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is convenient and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is offset by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.

The developers of punBB focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful punBB resources:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB uses files instead of a database to store data.

A convenient text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates on the fly, the ability to convert a page into a "printable version" - these are not all the features of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a little digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that have a good effect on increasing targeted traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed, using the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics, how they advance and described how this can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, user warning system, the ability to pre-moderate topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all that SMF allows!

Intellect Board is the original free engine. The idea of ​​the Intellect Board developers is to create a site based on the forum. The functionality of the Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, a presentation, news, a file archive, a photo gallery, an IRC chat, an encyclopedia. In fact, Intellect Board is a complete content management system.

The main features of the Intellect Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for GD and GD2 graphic libraries for creating small copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and encouragement by moderators and administrators (moreover, warnings can be either unlimited or time-limited), rating topics, articles, files and photos/

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board))

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It also, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, server load is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, no databases are required, for its operation it is enough that the hosting has php support.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS - most of the modules are installed in one click

Advantages of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installing add-ons (in most cases, uploaded, pressed one button - and that's it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to additions, of which about 450 are now written.

Another interesting feature of the Vanilla forum engine is the "Whisper" system - you can simply send a whisper message to someone without leaving the topic page or create a "whisper" topic that will be a visual history of correspondence.

In case someone doesn't know, Simple Machines Forum - SMF for short - is, as stated on the official website, a free, professional-level package that will allow you to organize your own online community in a few minutes. on this engine, you can see here. I myself put my forum on it (by the way, visit FreeForum.biz).

It doesn't matter how much or how little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you spend your precious time on moderation. Setting up a plugin that will do all the work for you takes a few minutes, and it will save you a total of days and months, which will add up from the minutes that you would spend deleting messages and deleting users.

I will note that I tried to fight spammers on my own - I blocked access by IP and even by subnets. It really worked, it filtered out a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days someone made its way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought that there must be a more convenient way, and it really was!

1. Installing and configuring Stop Spammer

In two weeks of operation, this plugin blocked 2202 fake users. Each of them would leave at least one message. Spammers are not going to slow down and every day I would spend time clearing my forum.

Instead, every few days I go to the user management page and see something like this:

I turn to the “Pending approval” section (these are the spammers found who are unable to leave messages until their accounts are approved by the administrator). I put a tick "Select all" and delete them with one click:

That's it, all spam accounts go to oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? Select all and send with one button for verification:

One “red” appeared, we immediately delete it. If you have free time, you can do others. If there is no time, then do nothing with new users - most of them will "blush" on subsequent checks. If you have time, you can go to their profiles and see - if there is a link in the signature - immediately banned, these are fake accounts of spammers who will never leave a single useful message.

I told you how to use this magical plugin, now I will tell you how to install it.

Download two files: language_full.zip (this is the language pack for translating the plugin) and StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip (the number may be different as versions are updated). Unzip the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive to some folder. Unzip the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.

Go to the admin panel to install packages. Opposite the inscription "Download package" there is a button for selecting a file on the computer. Choose our new archive (where we replaced the language file), upload it to the forum and activate the package.

That's it!

Additional plugin configuration takes place in the admin panel: go to

Users → Registration → Settings

You can leave the default values ​​there. There is also a "Your API key" field. Without this key, you won't be able to report new spammers (but the plugin will work and filter known spammers). If you want to get your own API key, go to www.stopforumspam.com to register, and then enter the key here. If you have not received the key yet, leave the field blank. Then the default key will be used.

2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links

Adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a strong conviction that by increasing the number of links to their site, they “promote” it (for some reason, the idea of ​​creating interesting and high-quality content is not intended for anyone from they don't come to mind). There would be a sucker, but there are ways to get money from him. So, some "citizens" provide services for "running" sites on forums. They create a large number of accounts on various forums and insert backlinks in signatures and other available fields. Despite the fact that even “seo-experimenters” have already proven by experience that these links are of no use, some warn that you can get banned from search engines for this, Yandex, for example, simply ignores links on ALL forums and sites where anyone can leave links. Google also has similar algorithms - ignoring links in comments, etc. But the law is not written for suckers ... Therefore, we, forum owners, have to reckon with the facts that "cool SEO-optimizers" order a "run" of their shit crafts for a thousand rubles.

The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! It is possible to knock out from under the feet of spammers the very interest to post links on your forum. That's what Anti-Spam Links is for. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does this:

• those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
• those who, for example, have less than 15 posts cannot leave active links, http:// is removed from links and in general these links become nubolinks (newbielink)
• those with, for example, less than 50 posts can leave active links, but all links receive the nofollow attribute.
• well, those with more than 50 posts can insert the most common active links that transfer site weight to the page they link to.

Believe me, would-be SEOs are very attentive to the form in which their link gets to the site. They will lose interest in your forum very quickly if they cannot easily post their shit links to their shit sites there.

Yes, by the way, the above rules work in such fields as signatures.

To install this plugin, go to its official page. Download anti_spam_links_v1.0.1.zip archive (number may be different). Again in the forum admin, go to install packages (as you did with the previous package) and install it. There is no language file for this package, so you do not need to unpack the archive or do anything with it.

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Config → Configure Mods… → Configure Mods

At your request, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will VERY make life easier for you, the forum owner, and save a lot of time. However, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, you need to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. Therefore, do not abandon your web resources!

Well, let's start giving small tips on optimizing and promoting sites (forums) on phpBB. In this case, we will carry out a small hack that will help get rid of the external link of the form " Powered by phpBB ©...". In this publication, we will consider 2 ways in which you can do this - a technique for phpBB 3.x.x.

Removing an External Link Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group and Russian phpBB Support

The first way to remove an external link labeled Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group. And so, the easiest way is to remove it using the admin panel. We go into the administrative panel, go to the "Styles" menu item, on the left we see the panel where the block in the menu is located, we are interested in the "Style Components" block, and in it "Templates". According to the standard, in the proposed window we will see the following: prosilver and subsilver2, although there may be others if you installed them. In general, it's not the point. From the proposed set, select the default one. Click on the "edit" button next to the template. Next, a window appears asking you to "Select a template file". Next, select "Template file" - "overall_footer.html". An HTML editor appears below. We find the following code: Powered by phpBB 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group"and just delete it, although you can set your own link and inscription."
(TRANSLATION_INFO) " (which is below, can also be deleted) - this code is responsible for localization, for example, an external link with the inscription "Russian phpBB support".

The second way to remove an external link that says Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group. This method is similar, but we connect to the site via ftp pratacol. Go to the following path styles/template_name/template/overall_footer.html. And we edit the same code that we edited above. If you change the code, then do not forget to set the UTF encoding - so "crazy" (squares, and other incomprehensible characters) may appear in place of the anchors.

Let's start right away with the main script code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# which-forum.pl script
# (c) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http://website/

use strict;

# commented lines - for strictness
# if the task is to collect engine statistics, leave it as is
# if you make a list of forums - uncomment

my $data ;
$data .= $_ while (<> ) ;

# check how many were Powered by phpBB without footer link
print "phpbb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?phpbb\.com\/?"[^>]*>phpBB/i or
# $data =~ /viewforum\.php\?[^""]*f=\d+/i or
$data =~ /phpBB\-SEO/i or
$data =~ /) ;
print "ipb \n"
if ($data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?invision(?:board|power)\.com\/?[^"]*"[^>]*> [^<]*IP\.Board/i or
$data =~ /]+href="[^"]*http:\/\/(?:www\.)?invisionboard\.com\/?"[^>]*>Invision Power Board/i or
$data =~ /