This and other scripts mentioned in the post can be found in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the html-page code 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. Firstly, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows us to download the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several parsers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is a 100% sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of the signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and “won” the engine with the highest weight. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

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

To get the list of forums, I used my Google parser. The search engine was sent queries like

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

etc. You can find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to the .ru zone, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. It was difficult to conduct such a study last time, since 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 is 600 sites on Drupal?

I must admit that the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7,083 engines were successfully identified, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I did not take into account some engine? Did Bitrix stand on half of the forums? Or should I have spent more time looking for signatures? In general, more research is needed here.

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

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 advise strongly trusting these figures (they say that every third forum in Runet works on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn.

For example, if you intend to make a site 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 the forum, the more likely it is to find a programmer who is well versed in it.

If no significant changes are expected in the engine, then it may make sense to choose a less popular engine, such as SMF or punBB. By doing this, you will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent to it.

Scripts for finding/defining forums can also find more than one practical use. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TCI and place posts with links to one of their sites in the first hundred. However, a hundred forum dofollow links did not affect the TIC in any way (2 updates have passed), so it's 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.

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

It doesn't matter how much or how little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you spend 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 that you would spend deleting 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 filtered out a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days someone made its way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought that there must be a more convenient way, and it really was!

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 clearing my forum.

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

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

That's it, all spam accounts go to oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? Select all and send 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" on 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 magical 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 as versions are updated). Unzip the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive to some folder. Unzip the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.

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

That's it!

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

Users → Registration → Settings

You can leave the default values ​​there. There is also a "Your API key" field. Without this key, you won't 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

Adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a strong 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 is not intended for anyone from they don't come to mind). 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 various forums and insert backlinks in signatures and other available fields. Despite the fact that even “seo-experimenters” have already proven by experience that these links are of no use, some warn that you can get banned 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 for suckers ... Therefore, we, forum owners, have to reckon with the facts that "cool SEO-optimizers" order a "run" of their shit crafts for a thousand rubles.

The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! It is possible to knock out from under the feet of spammers the very interest to post links on your forum. That's what Anti-Spam Links is for. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does this:

• those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
• those who, for example, have less than 15 posts cannot leave active links, http:// is removed from 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 site 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 will lose interest in your forum very quickly if they cannot easily post their shit links to their shit sites there.

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

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

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Config → Configure Mods… → Configure Mods

At your request, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will VERY make life easier for you, the forum owner, and save a lot of time. However, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, you need to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. Therefore, do not abandon your web resources!

Tours and holidays in Australia

Forums on the Internet are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is quite understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication of visitors. A forum is a great way to build a community on your site and build a loyal audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to review forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is the topic of a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine for yourself the following points:

1. What kind of forum functionality do you need. Most forum engines have a wide range of features, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and get acquainted with the detailed description of the functionality.

2. Paid or free engine - this point must also be taken into account. In this review, there are only two paid engines - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. The development of the community - when the engine has a developed community in both the English and Russian Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design patterns. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many points will have to be solved on your own.

4. The date of the last update of the engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers do not develop it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, enough big words 🙂. I'll start with the most popular forum engines based on this CMS ranking.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my Planet Photoshop forum on this engine. The reason is not only that this is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in Runet, so many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of user, moderator, administrator actions, fine-tuning of moderator and administrator access rights, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just some of the features of phpBB.

I also really like the direction in which phpBB is developing from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both the administrator, moderators and ordinary users.

My opinion after several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that is not demanding on hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.

Useful phpBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in Runet. It hosts many well-known forums. It has developed communities in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet.

There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of search robots.

Useful sites on Invision Power Board:

vBulletin is a great forum engine. It is paid, you can find out the cost. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Support for podcasting, automatic generation of forum RSS feeds, the ability for visitors to create social groups and interest clubs on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion.

punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is convenient and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is offset by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.

The developers of punBB focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful punBB resources:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB uses files instead of a database to store data.

A convenient text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates on the fly, the ability to convert a page into a "printable version" - these are not all the features of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a little digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that have a good effect on increasing targeted traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed, using the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics, how they advance and described how this can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, user warning system, the ability to pre-moderate topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all that SMF allows!

Intellect Board is the original free engine. The idea of ​​the Intellect Board developers is to create a site based on the forum. The functionality of the Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, a presentation, news, a file archive, a photo gallery, an IRC chat, an encyclopedia. In fact, Intellect Board is a complete content management system.

The main features of the Intellect Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for GD and GD2 graphic libraries to create small copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and encouragement by moderators and administrators (moreover, warnings can be both perpetual and limited in time), rating topics, articles, files and photos/

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board))

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It also, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, server load is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, no databases are required, for its operation it is enough that the hosting has php support.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS - most of the modules are installed in one click

Advantages of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installing add-ons (in most cases, uploaded, pressed one button - and that's it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to additions, of which about 450 are now written.

Another interesting feature of the Vanilla forum engine is the "Whisper" system - you can simply send someone a message in a whisper without leaving the topic page, or create a "whisper" topic that will be a visual history of correspondence.

Starting a New Topic

Browse to the board where you wish to post and click the new topic button (positioned by default at both the top and the bottom of the board, as shown in the ), which should take you to the Start new topic screen. While this presents a number of options, the two most important are the subject field and main message field (not labeled as such, but obvious by its size). So enter your subject and start to type (or paste) your message into the main text area, noting that a message missing either a subject or a body will not be accepted for posting until it has both. If you"re happy with your plain text message, you can then post it by clicking the post button and/or preview it first by clicking the preview button, but there are many further available to make things that little bit more interesting.

• Some forums show the navigation tree at the top in a space-saving horizontal mode.
• Some forums may be configured to offer an additional Spell Check button alongside the post and preview options.

Starting a New Poll

A poll is basically a topic with an added question and voting options, started by clicking New Poll instead of new topic. To post a poll it is necessary to fill out the Question field and at least two of the Option fields in addition to the subject and message fields required by a standard topic. Further options to configure how many choices the user may vote for, how long the poll should run, whether users can change their votes and what conditions must be fulfilled for the results to be displayed should be self-explanatory.

To offer more than five choices in a poll, simply click Add Option as many times as necessary.

Note that it may also be possible for some users in some forums to add a poll to an existing topic.

Posting an Event to the Calendar

Where this option has been configured (it"s not standard "out of the box"), you can post an event by selecting Calendar from the followed by Post Event from the calendar screen. What do you see now is a Start new topic screen with supplementary fields for the event title, date and target board, which simply add your event to the calendar and create a link back to your post in that board.

Replying to a Topic or Poll

Replying to a topic or poll is basically the same as , but it's not necessary to enter anything in the subject field unless you wish to change what"s already there. To vote in a poll, you simply have to select your chosen option(s) and click Submit Vote.

If "Quick Reply" has been enabled, a simple reply field will also appear after the post(s) on a page, but you"ll have to type yours and manually if you choose to use it.

Quoting a Post

To reply to a post by quoting it, you can either click the Quote button for the relevant post and add your own message to the quoted text or click the Reply button followed by Insert Quote from the relevant post in the "Topic Summary" below, but note that:

• Both these options add a link to the original post showing the name of the poster and the date and time of the post, whereas the quote tag simply quotes the relevant post without this additional information.
• You can also retain or add the "author" attribute independently of the full Quote function, as demonstrated in the below.

Modifying or Deleting a Post

To modify a post, click the Modify button and make your changes. Note that most forums are likely to be configured to show the date and time of the last edit, but the administrator(s) may also allow a short period to elapse before this happens.

To delete a post, click the Delete button followed by OK from the Remove this message? box that appears. Some forums may also allow you to remove topics or polls that you start, but the buttons for these are usually at the bottom of the page.

Standard Posting Options

Notify me of replies

Check this to subscribe to email notification for the topic.

Return to this topic

Check this to return to the topic (instead of the message index) after posting (NB you can also set this behavior as a preference in your profile).

Don't use smileys

Check this to prevent certain in your post from being parsed and rendered as smileys.

attachments

If enabled, this feature allows you to attach files to your posts in much the same way as most email clients, so you simply have to browse to the relevant file(s) on your computer before clicking post. You can delete your attachment(s) or add more by , but please note that:

• The permitted file types and sizes are set by the forum administrator(s).
• Although most forums are likely to be configured to display attached images as part of the post, it"s not possible to preview attachments so you should always browse to and attach your files just before you finally post your message.

References

SMF Bulletin Board Code

The buttons shown belong to the SMF default theme and may differ from forum to forum.