By choosing a specific topic for viewing, users are taken to a page with a list of posts in this topic.

Each individual message usually looks like this:

Usually, a small menu is displayed along the top and bottom of each page containing (depending on the forum settings) the following buttons:

• Answer- The most popular button with which users can post new messages in the topic.
• Notify- Subscription to receive notifications about new messages in this topic.
• Mark unread- You can mark the current topic as unread.
• Submit this thread- You can send a link to the current topic to your friend / acquaintance by specifying his e-mail.
• Seal- Creation of a printed version of the page with the content of the current topic, for viewing before printing.

Typically, the list of messages in a topic is displayed vertically: old messages at the top, new ones at the bottom. But each user can set a different, horizontal order in his profile. Then new messages will be posted at the top. Each message in the list is divided into two sections. The left section contains brief information about the author of the message, and the right section contains the message itself.

• Author Section
  • Post author- Nickname of the user (or guest) who left this message.
  • Signature above the avatar- Depending on the settings of the forum, users can have pre-created inscriptions over the avatars or can install them on their own. Typically, this signature serves to individually “mark” users.
  • Main group- Most often, all users are in the General users group, the name of which is not displayed. If the group is any other, its name will be displayed in this place. If the author of the post is a guest, a note about this will also be displayed here.
  • Group based on the number of posts- Depending on the number of messages left, users are divided into different groups (Newbie, Guest, etc.). The name of this group may not be displayed if the user belongs to a special group or its display is disabled in the settings of the current skin.
  • Emblem- Usually the number of images in the emblem is set depending on the rank of the group (for example, for beginners 1 star, for advanced users three, for veterans five), or use different images for different groups.
  • Number of messages- Displays the current number of messages for a specific user.
  • Icons for contacting the author- Displaying a variety of icons that help in one way or another to contact the author of the message: link to the profile, link to the site, ICQ number, e-mail, sending a private message.
• Post Section
  • Message icon- Individual icon chosen by the author when creating / sending a message.
  • Message subject- The title of the post usually coincides with the title of the topic, however, at the request of the author of the post, it can be changed to any other.
  • Button bar- At the top of each message, in the right corner, a series of buttons is displayed that allow you to perform certain quick actions on the message text: quote, change, delete, etc. (depending on the settings and installed mods). Most often, the "Quote" button is displayed, all other buttons are available only to the author of a particular message, as well as to moderators and administrators.
  • date and time- The date and time the post was published are displayed directly below its subject. A warning about the subsequent editing of the message will be displayed under its content and above the author's signature.
  • Text- The content of the message (if there are no messages, then why the forum?)
  • Signature- If the user has indicated his signature in the profile, it will be displayed here, under the text of the message.
  • Report to the moderator- You can quickly inform the moderators about each specific message (for example, complain if the message uses a mat).
  • Recorded by- A mark indicating that the IP address of the computer used by the user or guest when sending a message is stored in the logs (in the database). For administrators (and for those who are allowed), the IP itself is displayed next to this mark.

While these are the most common message elements when viewing topics, users can hide some of them by editing their profiles.

Well, let's start giving small tips for optimizing and promoting sites (forums) on phpBB. In this case, we will do a little hack that will help get rid of the external link of the form " 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. Next, 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, can also be deleted) - 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 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, do not forget to set the UTF encoding - this is how "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, which will add up from the minutes you would spend erasing messages and deleting users.

I will notice that I tried to fight spammers on my own - I blocked access by IP and even by subnets. It really worked, 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 2202 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 deprived of the opportunity to leave messages until their accounts are approved by the administrator). I tick the box "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? We select all 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 tell 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" label 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.

That's all done!

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

Users → Registration → Setting

You can leave the default values ​​there. 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 ​​creating interesting and high-quality content for none of it never occurs 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 for this you can get a ban from search engines, 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 for 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 that transfer the site's weight to the page they link 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 fields such 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 you did 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 you, 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. So don't throw your web resources away!

Long time no love for seobayers so iam writing this tutorial for you guys:

One of the biggest mysteries about xrumer has been creating profiles and me myself being a noob, but a smart one: P, always try to find ways for creating thins easier. Recently i was doing a test and found a good way of generating profile links easily. Before we start i will post results:

Tools- Hrefer 3.3, Xrumer 7.5, Scrapebox, Adword tool for keyword, Keyword studio pro and a linklist merger

Linklist generated- 250k (unique domains)
Profiles generated- 60k (unique domains) - a lot in just 20 days.

Step 1
Generate keywords which people actually try to rank for. This is the most crucial step in profile building. I saw a huge list being shared on another forum which had over 300k words. I say what is the use for searching keywords like "aaaaa", "abra ka dabra" etc. Who will rank for these? So i used common sense and generated keywords which people actually use for ranking.

Usage -
1) Note down atleast 100 keywords from google search (not adwords) which are broad and have massive competition like credit card, insurance etc.

2) One-by-one load these keywords into keyword studio pro (i used crack version: P) and generate similar keywords. Note that these words are better than scrapebox wonderwheel scraper.

3) Load all these keywords into scrapebox and generate keywords upto 3 levels. De-dup them etc. and save them. Then in the end make a huge list of all the keywords generated from original 100 words.

Step 2
Load them into hrefer but before you begin do this:

1) Edit additive words and just use these:

"powered by smf"
"powered by vbulletin"
"powered by phpbb"
"powered by ip.board"

Etc. etc. etc. but only forum software names. I did this so i don "t know which are most useful.

2) Edit search engine filter and place this:

Member.php? Action =
profile.php? viewprofile =

Etc. etc. basically all those filters which have view profile in their url.

The logic is to get maximum of those profiles which have been made for the purpose of visible backlinks. (Iam having trouble loggin into my dedi so will post the complete list later)

3) Start scraping and wait for it to complete.

Step 3- Another very important step.

Usually you all just load the links in xrumer and blast away but no you should analyze the database also to remove dead ones. So click on tools -> database analysis

1) Type the same "powered by" stuff into the box on left hand side.

2) Choose your linklist and select search content and 50 threads and go. This will remove all 404 forums and blogs etc.

Now we run xrumer with this linklist.

1) Load the database and setup your project.

2) Goto advanced options -> select register only, goto speed<--->success and move all the way to success and select recaptcha with 40-50 atempts.

3) Start and let it complete.

While the posting is done i usually move to next keyword building step.

When all your profiles are created, load them into linklist merger and create a big file from it. Now remove dups and all and you have a good profile link package.

So the jist is - keywords which people search - only few additive words and filters - right settings etc.

You will notice that from your final linklist with medium success and recpatcha off and 20-25 atempts for captcha you will get approx 30k + profiles. I get 60k with recaptcha and half-success

Happy profile creation ....