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

make that >5,000

... WOW.

WOW

make that 5,390 pages

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.ubbdev.com+ubbdev

fell on this http://www.matttorbindesigns.com/ubbdev.html and interesting in the first 10 links

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ubbdev.com+ubbdev.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N is a better URL, I think...
5,740

A slightly better link...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ubbdev.com+ubbdev.com&filter=0

That turns all the filtering off and allows you to get to all 50 pages...

5,980 currently...

> 6,000 note that say you type "UBB Spider", the second result is from ubbdev, and links to that topic..

~6200 pages

3,710

Looks like the UBBDev count has leveled out at around 6,000. I spotted Alexa spidering the site on Friday. Yay for archive.org!

mmm time machine...

6,680

cool

3,730

::bump:: 4,590

Google reports 12,100 for me

wow lol... I have to finish off my site (which i'm working on for once) before i'll start worrying about google anymore :x..

Google update: 16,600 Looks like it is going to take a bit to get through all 101,400 threads :rolleyes:

lol, nicely done :x... I finished a majority of my design for UGN, still have to work on some things before i have to worry about wpidering...

UBBDev:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=allinurl%3Aubbdev.com

15,200

My site:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=allinurl%3Apraisecafe.org

5,600

It will be interesting to see if ubbdev's drops a lot due to the old spidered url's not working anymore My site works with the old and new spider-friendly url's

there shouldn't be any reason the old urls won't work. All of my urls from the spider bait mod still work perfectly

Yeah, replacing ?, = and ; with / still works on 6.7.

Yeh well I'm still waiting on mine...

http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl%3Aundergroundnews.com&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off
5,170

isn't really going anywhere lol... I went ahead and rewrote my boards.php file to take and forward users to my board so that they at least can still go somewhere lol...

Well then, search with omitted changed it to 6,740 lol

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=allinurl:www.ubbdev.com

Results 1 - 3 of about 17,100 for allinurl:www.ubbdev.com. (0.19 seconds)

lucky you

Google has been indexing, then unindexing, etc my site.

Results 1 - 10 of about 137,000 English pages for allinurl:ubbdev.com. (0.30 seconds)

I got 44,100 results

that link is up to 44,500

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=allinurl:ubbdev.com

This one is up to:

Results 1 - 10 of about 147,000 for allinurl:ubbdev.com. (0.31 seconds)

Allen, theres a major flaw in your link; it's displaying everyone linking to UBBDev, not just spidered pages on UBBDev...

In actuality you have:
Results 1 - 10 of about 15,300 from www.ubbdev.com for ubbdev.com. (0.28 seconds)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Awww.ubbdev.com+ubbdev.com&btnG=Search

Still better than mine though:
Results 1 - 10 of about 6,940 from www.undergroundnews.com for undergroundnews.com. (0.41 seconds)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=site%3Awww.undergroundnews.com+undergroundnews.com&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ubbcentral.com+ultimatebb&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&safe=off&start=10&sa=N

UBBcentral passed right by you guys. (requires ultimatebb.php cause it wouldn't be fair including threads pages too)

Results 1 - 10 of about 153,000 English pages for allinurl:ubbdev.com. (0.35 seconds)

Allen, that URL is wrong, you're asking google to show every site linking to ubbdev as well; try:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Awww.ubbdev.com+ubbdev.com&btnG=Search

Results 1 - 10 of about 15,500 from www.ubbdev.com for ubbdev.com. (0.16 seconds)

I do however love how results can fluctuate day by day, we went down about 400 lol...

Results 1 - 10 of about 6,510 from www.undergroundnews.com for undergroundnews.com. (0.27 seconds)

202 online right now

lol nice, I've had about 100 at any given time over the last week...

Appears yahoo indexes dynamic pages:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ubbdev.com&csz=&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=&toggle=1

(visit the 2+ pages..) 47,000+ pages too

Results 1 - 10 of about 56,300 from www.ubbdev.com for ubbdev.com. (0.03 seconds)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Awww.undergroundnews.com+undergroundnews.com&btnG=Search
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,200 from www.undergroundnews.com for undergroundnews.com. (0.25 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 56,300 from www.ubbdev.com for ubbdev.com. (0.03 seconds)

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"Results 1 - 10 of about 287,000 from www.ubbdev.com for ubbdev.com"