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Proper 301 Moved Permanently - after PHPBB to vanilla conversion???
Ive lost 90% of my google referral traffic 
Ive searched and didnt find any clear answer on how to setup a 301 from the old PHPBB urls to Vanilla forums 2.x.
I tried a simple rule (based on some old posts I found) which converts:
/viewtopic.php?t=123
to
/discussions/123
but that doesnt work with vanilla 2.x
Need some ideas... this traffic loss is killing my site
0
Comments
What version number of Vanilla are you running?
IIRC you were running 2.0.18.8.
This is what I would do:
showthread.php,showpost, andregister.phpto your root vanilla 2.0.18.8 install foldershowpost.phptoviewtopic.phpSearch first
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I assume upgrading to 2.1.b2 would have the same effect?
If, so ill just do that.
I just want to point out that those files are completely standalone and don't depend on a specific version of Vanilla at all.
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Im using the viewtopic.php file and it works great! THANK YOU!!!!
But question..... why is the following necessary?
Why would they go into the install folder???
"Copy the files showthread.php, showpost, and register.php to your root vanilla 2.0.18.8 install folder"
You only need the
showthread.phpandviewtopic.phpfiles in your forum root folder. I just suggested the others for a more complete permanent redirect solution.The files need to be in your root folder to match where they were in PHPBB, if I recall correctly.
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phpBB is old style as it doesn't go through a single dispatcher and is view driven rather than controller driven. Those file are entry points which rewrite/redirect traffic.
grep is your friend.
where?
https://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden/archive/2.1.zip
Thanks.
I need to setup a redirect for a phpbb3 forum as well. I'm a little confused by the instructions above. Please confirm that what I need to do is:
1) Have the files showthread.php, showpost.php, and register.php located in the root folder of my Vanilla forum.
2) Copy the viewtopic.php file from my phpbb forum to the root folder of my Vanilla forum.
3) Cut and paste the code from the showpost.php into the viewtopic.php file.
That's it?
Thanks,
'm
@meshugy don't copy anything from phpbb at all. Just create a copy of showpost.php called viewtopic.php in your vanilla root folder.
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thanks for the clarification!
I've added viewtopic.php to the 2.1 beta for the next release.
All my old phpbb links are redirecting perfectly into the root installation of my 2.1b2 Vanilla forum. However, when I embedded it into another site, the redirect took me to the correct url in the root installation and then forced a redirect to the embedded forum's main page. Unfortunately the redirect doesn't follow through to the correct url in the embedded page, leaving the user on the main page.
Is there anyway to get a 301 redirect to go from Goolge>Vanilla>Embedded Vanilla ?
If you adding all these files for these old school forums without a single dispatcher, it could get really cluttered in the root.
it would make more sense if you used the dispatcher and had a compatibility layer.
grep is your friend.
@x00 That's true, but then we'd be mucking about in the dispatcher, which is probably the most-likely-to-break-in-weird-ways piece of code in the whole system, introducing unknown instability or consequences. Or I could just stick a file in root and be done.
The only people bothered are developers, who should know enough that they can delete them if they don't need them.
I don't think so really, I mean the dispatcher itself is hooked. There isn't too much to do, it merely routing. I'm not saying put that code in the the dispatcher.
Anyway, it is not problem now, just an opinion piece. There are bigger fish to fry.
grep is your friend.
Is it safe to say there's no easy way to do this? I'll probably forgo embedding all together in favor of a conventional install with matching skin. That will solve the 301 redirect issue as well as a few other problems the embedded forum is having.
Sorry, my English not good ... forgo means replace your current install with a non-embedded install? Good idea!
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Yes, exactly. The embedding works quite well in most respects. However, if I can't get my old Google indexed phpbb links to redirect to the correct url within the embedded forum, then it's all for not there's no way I'm giving up those hard won rankings.