You will find this and other scripts mentioned in the post in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the code of the html page for the presence of forum engine signatures in it. We used a similar technique when defining WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. First, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to load a page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of the signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the highest weight "won". I decided that in this case, this approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

To test how the script works, I did some research. I compiled a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my own script, thereby determining the percentage of program triggers and the popularity of various engines.

I used my google parser to get a list of forums. The search engine sent requests like

site: forum. *. ru
site: talk. *. ru
site: board. *. ru
site: smf. *. ru
site: phpbb. *. ru
....

etc. The complete code of the query generator can be found in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl... In addition to zone.ru ,.su .ua .kz and.by were also used. It was difficult to do this research last time because WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in the URL. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What are 600 Drupal sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment upset me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7083 were successfully identified with the engine, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I left out some engine? Was Bitrix really on half of the forums? Or should I spend more time searching for signatures? In general, more research is required here.

Among 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%)

They are closely followed by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I would not recommend strongly trusting these figures (they say, every third forum in RuNet works on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn.

For example, if you intend to create a website on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $ 0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular a forum is, the more likely it is to find a programmer who is well versed in it.

If significant changes in the engine are not expected, then it may make sense to choose not the most popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of automatically sent spam on it.

Scripts for finding / defining forums can also find many practical uses. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TCI and place on the first hundred posts with links to one of their sites. However, a hundred forum dofolllow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are interested in transitions.

It is clear that the named use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum in components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones I've just started using is Starting a New SMF Category, hopefully with some helpful material. We start small, and as a beginner, very useful.

First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: remove copyright and external links

I'll make a reservation right away that I'm working only smf 2 and this article will refer specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I do not like to put on "10" external links to the official sites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we delete the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML "! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum / Themes / name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php... Naturally, at the very bottom is the code (about 330 lines), which is displayed by external links that we do not like so much. Therefore, we delete: "

Well, let's start giving small tips for optimizing and promoting sites (forums) on phpBB. In this case, we'll do a little hack to get rid of the external link like " Powered by phpBB ©... ". In this publication we will consider 2 ways with which you can do this - a trick for phpBB 3.x.x.

Removing external link Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group and phpBB Russian support

First way to remove xref labeled Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group... And so, the easiest way is to uninstall using the admin panel. We go to 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". By standard, in the proposed window, we will see the following: prosilver and subsilver2, although there may be others, if you installed them. In general, not the point. From the proposed set, select the default one. Click on the "edit" button next to the template. Then a window appears with the offer "Select a template file". Next, select "Template file" - "overall_footer.html". Below the HTML editor appears. 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 caption."
(TRANSLATION_INFO) "(which is below, you can also delete it) - this code is responsible for localization, for example, an external link labeled" Russian phpBB support ".

Second way to remove external link labeled Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group... This method is similar, but we connect to the site using the 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 "krakozyably" (squares and other incomprehensible characters) may appear in place of the anchors.

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

It doesn't matter if a lot or a little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you are wasting 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 that would add up to the minutes you would spend erasing 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 eliminated a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days someone made their way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought there must be a more convenient way, and it really was found!

1. Installing and configuring Stop Spammer

In two weeks of operation, this plugin blocked 2,202 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 cleaning up my forum.

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

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

That's all, all spam accounts are sent into oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? Select everyone and send them 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" during 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 magic plugin, now I will show 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, since the versions are updated). Unpack the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive into some folder. Unpack the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now, zip our folder.

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

You're done!

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

Users → Registration → Setting

You can leave the default values \u200b\u200bthere. There is also a field called "Your API Key". Without this key, you will not 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

The adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a firm conviction that by increasing the number of links to their site, they "promote" it (for some reason, the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating interesting and high-quality content for none of does not occur to them). 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 different forums and insert backlinks there in signatures and in other available fields. Despite the fact that even "seo-experimenters" have already empirically proven that there is zero sense from these links, some warn that you can get a ban 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 to suckers ... Therefore, we, the owners of forums, have to reckon with the facts that “cool SEO-optimizers” order a “run” of their shitty things for a thousand rubles.

The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! You can knock out the interest of spammers to post links on your forum. This is what Anti-Spam Links is for. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does so:

• those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
• those who, for example, have less than 15 messages, cannot leave active links, http: // is removed from the 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, which transfer the weight of the site to the page being linked to.

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

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

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

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Configuration → Configuring Mods ... → Configuring Mods

If you wish, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will make your life VERY easy for the forum owner and will save you a lot of time. Nevertheless, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, it is necessary to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. Therefore, don't throw your web resources away!