Hi guys, sorry for some dumb questions, but I'm completely new to phpBB AND SEO, so I'm a little over my head here.

I'm pretty sure I've installed everything ok, but now every single forum, post and member ID I click is giving me a 404 error. In the ACP I checked and it said look at the .htaccess file, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing in there, so looking through it isn't going to help me much.

The site is http://the-songwriter.co.uk/ if you want to have a look at it and see what I mean.

Also, a much less serious issue is that whenever I click a link to go back to board index, it's redirecting me to the-songwriter.co.uk/phpbb3/ rather than the-songwriter.co.uk/phpbb/index.php , and I'm getting a blank page. It's not a big problem, as I can just set up a redirect for it, but if I can sort it it would be great.

All in all, I'm very impressed so far - I've tried a couple of SEO mods and this is the first one that has even come close to working. If you can sort this for me, I'd be more than happy to make a small donation to any server costs you have to show my appreciation for an excellent mod.

EDIT: I've had my hosting provider take a look and he's fairly sure the edits have been made and are in the right place and can see no reason why I should be getting 404 errors.

If needed I can create an account with admin permissions for you to have a look around and see if you can see what the problem is.

First, make sure about your phpBB Server and Cookie settings

Then, generate an .htaccess and put it where the red messages displayed by the .htaccess generator tells you to (and not anywhere else).

Should work right away, if it does not, you may need to adjust slashes a bit, but the default .htaccess should do it if mod_rewrite is actually available on your server.

Now, since you're just opening your forum, you should consider installing it at the domain's root level, rather than redirecting the root to phpbb3/, or at least use a more meaning full directory name than phpbb3 (you would need to adjust your server config if you do it for script path). An note that the redirection that you implemented could interfere with the phpBB SEO .htaccess at some point.
Tell me more about how you did it if you need more help, and note that you can deactivate url rewriting until you fix the .htaccess.

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Ah, found the problem - I also had a .htaccess in my root/phpbb3/ folder - just deleted that and it worked first time.

Thanks for your help DCZ - do you have a 'donation' system where I can show my appreciation for an excellent mod?

EDIT: and also, do you know of a possible fix for the error where the 'board index' links are redirecting to the the-songwriter.co.uk/phpbb3/ directory instead of the the-songwriter.co.uk/phpbb3/index.php page? I've tried the instructions in the readme, but they caused a lot of debug errors in functions.php - I'm sure it's a fairly simple fix, but I'm not savvy enough with php or html to really know how to do it myself.

No donation yet, but we should set one in the future, thanks for your concern

Then, you will find answers here, where I just posted : Access index.php

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