I am evaluating PhPBB SEO, and I was surprised after all the work of installing it that all the URLs had the format forum-name-fx. Why the fx? The Google SEO tutorial is very explicit and says to create user friendly URLs. There is nothing user friendly about having an fx in the forum URL. No user is ever going to remember it.

Is there a way to remove it? Could you point me to the part of the code I need to modify? That would save me a lot of time.

Thank you.

Well don't you find that nice-keywords-you-can-choose-in-acp-fxx.html is a lot more SEO friendly than viewforum.php?f=xx ?

The -fxx purpose is just to pass the forum ID to phpBB.

But, if you want to go further into RTFM, you'll notice that there is a "remove forum id" option in acp which does exactly that, eg get rid of the -fxx bit with no code changes

Once you activate the option, you'll have to set custom URLs in forum url management before the -fxx actually goes away. Please take good care about the fact that forum url without ID will NOT be automatically redirected if you later change the forum URL by the zero duplicate (as it would be the case if you kept them). It's not really an issue since you're not supposed to change forum URL that often and also because you can still update forum titles without altering forum urls, but this means that you should better be sure about what you want to do when you set the custom forum urls without id.

I encourage you to do some local testing in order to better understand the numerous possibilities offered by the mod, and elect the one that best fit your case without jeopardizing your live forum indexing and ranking.

++

All my testing is being done on a staging system, I would never apply this to my live forum.

What I am seeing on my staging system is that no matter what options I choose, the system keeps putting back the forum id. Is this just an artifact of the SEO admin interface?

dcz wrote:Once you activate the option, you'll have to set custom URLs in forum url management before the -fxx actually goes away.

did you do it ?

Got it, I somehow missed it.

Now how do I get the structure forum/sub-forum? Is that possible? I tried to put in the slash, but the admin interface removes the slashes.

This is currently unsupported because it would require, in order to work in all cases, to add several SQL queries.

What is RTFM?

dcz wrote:Well don't you find that nice-keywords-you-can-choose-in-acp-fxx.html is a lot more SEO friendly than viewforum.php?f=xx ?

The -fxx purpose is just to pass the forum ID to phpBB.

But, if you want to go further into RTFM, you'll notice that there is a "remove forum id" option in acp which does exactly that, eg get rid of the -fxx bit with no code changes

Once you activate the option, you'll have to set custom URLs in forum url management before the -fxx actually goes away. Please take good care about the fact that forum url without ID will NOT be automatically redirected if you later change the forum URL by the zero duplicate (as it would be the case if you kept them). It's not really an issue since you're not supposed to change forum URL that often and also because you can still update forum titles without altering forum urls, but this means that you should better be sure about what you want to do when you set the custom forum urls without id.

I encourage you to do some local testing in order to better understand the numerous possibilities offered by the mod, and elect the one that best fit your case without jeopardizing your live forum indexing and ranking.

++

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM

LMAO. What an appropriate question! One last question tho. Where is the manual for the premod & all the mods in it? I just see a few threads (premod, advanced, simple, mixed, etc), but not one comprehensive manual.

I've set up a local install & I would like my urls to look like -http://www.site.com/forum/post.html, but can't figure out how to set that up.

Thanks!

qu4rk wrote:LMAO. What an appropriate question! One last question tho. Where is the manual for the premod & all the mods in it? I just see a few threads (premod, advanced, simple, mixed, etc), but not one comprehensive manual.

I've set up a local install & I would like my urls to look like , but can't figure out how to set that up.

Thanks!

Just to save others some typing & to help those who come after me.

Found manual here:

phpBB SEO Ultimate SEO URL Presentation

To get my urls to look like the above question is the advanced mode with virtual folders!