UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat UBB Spider Hack: Review

This is my official review on the UBB Spider Hack by Total Web Package.

When reading the information on the UBB Spider Hack I had a lot of doubts about it, afterall the UBB is dynamic so information isn't indexed in the first place, but hey I had nothing to loose.

After having the UBB Spider Hack running for about a week or so, Google states that 1,030 BBS pages have been crawled... Granted that it's not that many, yet, but it's still more than UBB out of the box.

And the best thing is that it's the newest pages. Now, there are more ways to get more crawled, such as making the index pages how google wants them, with as little of topics shown as possible; possibly even with the Wacking Days Pruned mod installed.

We're now getting more visitors from search engines just for the bbs rather than with the standard page!

Best of all, Micah Sparacio (the developer) is usually around for any help with the script. That and it's not a mod, it's an addon... Just drop the file in and link to it and you're ready to run.

All in all, I'm completley content with the pricing structure on the UBB Spider Hack for the amount of traffic that it brings in. I'd sugguest that anyone who wants a little more bbs traffic go ahead and at least look the UBB Spider Hack over, you won't regret it.

Lastly, the UBB Spider Hack will run with the UBB Accelerator and with the standard ultimatebb.cgi file.

Links for this review:
UBB Spider Hack
UGN\'s BBS WITH the UBB Spider Hack
UGN\'s BBS WITHOUT the UBB Spider Hack
Google\'s Listing of our BBS
A slightly better URL of Google\'s listing of our bbs...

Nice Review Gizzy

http://www.praisecafe.org/boards

Lol, I thought that site looked familliar... :x... It's a nice addon, I really like it, helps with the traffic .

Yes it does, we've been experiencing new growth since installing it for sure, and I don't think it's my engaging personality doing the trick

No need to hack files? Hmmmm, this thing sounds great!

It is quite nice , basically he'll send you boards.php and some code to add into an .htaccess file and you're set, he even does the configuration of the boards.php file for you, which I quite appreciated .

hmm expensive though

If people are interested I will tell you how to achieve the same using apache rewrite handlers and editing 3 files

Dunno what this hack might be adding more since I didn't see the code

I was thinking the same thing Charles. $50 for a UBB Addon seems rather steep to me. That's 25% of the base cost of a UBB license. Not to mention requiring each page to be tagged by their script.

ok just to show you how this would be done. Basicly add something like this to your htaccess file
now accessing ubbcgi/forum1.html is exactly the same as http://path/ultimatebb.cgi?=forum&f=1 but you might want to put the htaccess file in an other folder (board, forum etc.)

for this exemple in public_forum_summary.pl
find and replace:
and voila

This is a not a hack just an exemple, I know that I am not taking the accelerator into account

the guys addon does not require editing because basicly instead of calling the ubb I suppose he calls the php script which gets the data and then feeds it.

It may be a little pricy, but keep in mind that advertising would be much, much more... (PPC programs for example)...

still I am going to do a free alternative as soon as I have a second.

I already started for threads though classic would be easier to do. Depending on the feedback ans suggestions I get for the threads version I will then do classic.

lol... is there any function to control the output? ie. if I type 'print "hello"', it goes to a certian sub in a library file which prints it on the screen... if so maybe we could just add a small sub to the end of ultimatebb.cgi, something like:
$content_to_print =~ m/ultimatebb.php?ubb=(.+?)(&.+?)?/, then to split & in $2 for each variable, and do a replace regex

While it may work, Micah's work is very good, would be hard to create something new that adds so little overhead to the server...

BTW, I installed this a couple weeks ago, last week I had 835 threads listed at google, this morning I am up to > 1,000 I've had more new registrations to the forum in the last 10 days than the last 3 months

http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:praisecafe%2Bboards%2Bubb%2Bget_topic&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=0

< 1030 lol...

1090

We're now running a basic spider-friendly URL hack here at UBBDev, without needing mod_rewrite. If it works well for the next day or so, it will be released.

Awesome!!!!

Cool... I got mine for free so that i could review it...

1600 threads now

Ooooh, I cant'wait.

1510

Does the spiderhack work with the built in PM indicator?

It doesn't seem to show up when a new private message shows up on the spider hack pages.

Doesn't appear it does, the notification disappears when I switch to the spider pages and reappears when I switch back. A cookie issue I guess.

Sorry for the high cost for the spider hack;-) It is basically to cover installation support, etc. I would give Charles' mod a try if it ends up working well. I'm really not trying to make much money off this, only trying to make it worth my time while I balance with grad school.

The cookie issue is on the backburner at this point (I've been aware of it for a few months now, but haven't had the time to research it). One workaround is to continue feeding your users the CGI/PHP dynamic URLs while feeding Google the spider hack (a legitimate form of cloaking in my opinion).

In any case, I just wanted to stop in and mention that if you are familiar with mods (most ubbdev members are) then give Charles' method a shot. Free is better than $50!!!

Its what I'm doing :x...

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.ubbdev.com+ubbdev&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=40&sa=N - starting to crawl

sweet

::ponders:: if i run both mods, will it get me more listings... ::cackles:: :x

actually, it will, if you link them to both /boards and /cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

I wonder if you get better search engine results if you reverse the order of:

board name: thread title

as the title of the thread's page?

I think it does not really matter as long as the word is the title

Does this addon work on Windows 2000 Server boxes as well?

good question... you using IIS or apache?

Charles' mod will work on any UBB, the other one requires apache

Apache can be ran on 2k :x

IIS is what I'm running on.

Did I miss it? Is Charles' mod available? I'd like to start using it right away.

Charles' mod should be available by this weekend

Sweet, I can't wait for it to be publicly tested heh, then i'll think of using it... lol

we're up to >4800 pages in google now

lol nice