phpBB2 hacked - SEO thing

[swiety]

Hi!
Unfortunately, my phpBB2 (newest available version 2.0.23) was hacked/exploited.
I don't know if the attacker found a bug in any of modifications I have used or straight is phpBB2 script.
As for today I don't know about any other phpBB2 expoit except "phpBB 2.0.23 Session Hijacking Vulnerability"..
The only way out from this situation is to upgrade to phpBB3 probably - because I don't even know what bug he used to get the access, so...
The board is really big one and has a lot of modified code, so most probably it takes me couple of days to get it all work on BB3 version
and while I'll be working on upgrade please advice me sth about SEO.
Do I have to redirect temporary or sth like that?
Many of my boards topics are in google's top10, so how to tell robots now to update the content?
I simply put index.php file with maintenance information, but should I add noindex and nofollow meta tags to it?
Should all the pages temp redirected to this temp index file, so i user get to any of them by google he won't get 404 error ?
Thanks in advance.
Reply asap.

[SeO]

No luck

So at first I would 302 (yes 302) redirect all phpBB2 content to a flat .html file announcing that your forum will be back again in a few.
The 302 won't tell bots to drop the initial url, so that search engine should try them again until they'll get redirect to the final phpBB3 ones with the same content as before.
Another way of doing it would be to use a 503 header, should more or less be the same.
This could be done by adding and index.html file in your domain's root (example.com/index.html), and use this in the domain's root .htaccess

Code: Select all

[code]RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/?.+$ / [R=302,L][/code]

or :

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/?.+$ / [R=503,L]

For a 503.

Then, you can convert to phpBB3 and remove that code as soon as it is done.

To do this you have several options. I don't know if your phpBB2 was using url rewriting and if you plan to use some with phpBB3, but you should know that since phpBB2 urls are a bit different from phpBB3 (topic use forum id in url), if you go from phpBB2 with no url rewriting to phpBB3 with no url rewriting you will end up with many more duplicates (phpBB2 urls still will work as before, but phpBB3 will display different urls without redirection).
It's totally different with url rewriting in phpBB3 with our Zero duplicate.
If phpBB2 was no using url rewriting, redirection will be as simple as turn the zero dupe on with the post redirection option set to at least guest. If phpBB2 was using url rewriting, then, you will need to additionally keep some of the phpBB2 rewriterules in you phpBB3 .htaccess to allow the zero dupe to handle all redirections (if so, post your phpBB2 .htaccess here).

So before you provide with more info, I strongly encourage you to give a local try to our SEO premod. It's quick way to find out all the possibilities offered by our SEO mods here and to decide what to do.
You can use the premod to convert your phpBB2, or decide to only install the mods you want to use separately on a vanilla phpBB3. Though, the premod can be handy since we provide with the same update packages as phpBB but with our mod's updates in them. This makes update easier because you only have to worry about additional mods you may use, not the seo mods themselves.

[swiety]

At first, thanks for your reply.
As I told you before, I'm runnig phpBB2 2.0.23 and yes, it's using phpbb-seo Advanced SEO URL as well as Zero Duplicate.
I have XAMPP installed, it's a must.
The reason I'm still on BB2 is that my forum's code is quite heavy modified and to get all the funcionality into BB3 would be not so easy I guess.
I found an update to one of my modification and applied code changes, so we will see if that was the reason.
I put board in "read only" mode to prevent messing up the whole case.
Meanwhile I'm wasting my free time during christmass to get the script back to life
That was really bad luck at all, but what can I say... BB2 is unsupported from 1 year as well as mods for it - I've checked couple of authour's websites and they don't even exist anymore.
Just hope that I would be able to move most important code modifications into BB3. I know the structure of the script differs, but keep you fingers crossed for me, please.
For now I put the forum back online, bacause I updated one file where the auth wasn't checked properly, but I'm not sure if it solve the problem, so anyway I'm preparing to move into BB3.

[SeO]

Converting From phpBB 2 with AMR to phpBB 3 with AMR

This thread should help, but still read this post before : Problem with traffic