On my BellaOnline forum I enabled the robot friendly URLs and it worked perfectly. No muss, no fuss.

So then on my WineIntro.com forum I decided to do the same thing.

It doesn't work - but it's very odd!

If you go here -

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php/forum_summary

If you click on any forum in the center, it just refreshes on the same page again. If you choose a link on the left (which uses the old style URLs) those work to navigate through the areas. And then once you get into an area the old way, you can now go "up a level" to see the forum area with the new style URL. But you can't go to that URL directly.

Any ideas?

Sounds like "Accept Path Info" isn't enabled for wineintro.com, which would make it work how you're describing.

I've never heard of "Accept Path Info". Is that some sort of an Apache thing? I'm running IIS on all my servers, and didn't have to enable anything on the BellaOnline server to get this to work.

Ahh, yeh, Accept Path Info is an apache thing, not sure what the IIS equivalent is...

I'm not finding on the web that there really is an equivalent for IIS. Also, I run IIS on all three servers. I believe they are all set up in the exact same way. So it's confusing to me that the BellaOnline UBB forum did this smoothly while the WineIntro forum is having this issue. Also it's confusing that I can cut and paste the exact same URL into two different browser windows and one works while the other does not work. The one that I first went to via the old style URL works - but the one that I "fresh" try to go to the new style URL will not work. With the exact same URL.

I'm not finding much either. From what I've found so far there may be a way to work around this that I'll try for version 8.

On your comments are you saying the spider friendly will work in one browser and not another?

Well I can't remember how I resolved my Path_Info issues with iis a couple years ago because it was several tries till it worked. But I remember I did edit php.ini and added
cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI. PHP's previous behavior was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not care what PATH_INFO is. For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specifications. Setting this to 1 causes PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the specification.
This came from microsoft web site HERE this applies to fast cgi and IIS6.

Also I found that I had a variable called "ORIG_PATH_INFO" that did work and I might of hacked that in the ubb file "ubbthreads.inc.php".
There is a more current post at this site HERE by Rick. That states that it was omitted in error at one time in the script to look for it as a secondary variable.

Thats all I remember doing but...

It finally worked but I have since moved From IIS to Apache

OK I added the cgi.fix_pathinfo line and rebooted the server. It's still behaving in the same way.

I then went into the libs/ubbthreads.inc.php and added to line 1343 (not 1310 in my install, probably due to some of my tweaks) the ORIG_ part as per Rick's other post. It still isn't working.

Here's the behavior.

I go to the wine forums

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php/forum_summary

I click on the top area - cocktails. It tries to go to

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php/forums/35/1/Cocktails_Sangrias_Mixed_Drink

It ends up showing the main page again with all the categories.

So then I go to the "old style" URL I have hard coded in the left column. Again, the cocktails link, in the old style URL -

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=35

That works.

I think I was confused about the new URLs working after that. I can't get it to recreate that behavior now (although maybe I 'broke' it with these changes I just made )

So to summarize I can't get spider friendly URLs to work at all on my wine server, which is running IIS. The spider friendly URLs are running perfectly on my BellaOnline server, which is also running IIS. The wine server is Windows 2003 and PHP 5.2.1. I am barely fluent in PHP so all of the PHP installs are very basic.

BTW I just turned OFF Spider friendly URLs until we can resolve this. I'd left it on to try to test but at this point I really need the boards working properly for visitors. I'll reenable the setting if anyone has any other ideas.

I believe another item I tried was AllowPathInfoForScriptMappings.
You can readup on it HERE
Enabling this will disable any asp pages and some say it is a security risk.
You can access it from the IIS console or in my case I think I had my host change it. By default it is off.
This causes the complete path to be passed to path_info value if off.
You might want to peek at the /forums.bella site and see if the setting is different from the wineintro site.
Also in lieu of testing the friendly urls on the board.
You can create a php file say pathinfo.php and place:
in the file.
Assuming you have that variable.
Up load it to your site
Then all you do is type say www.winintro.com/pathinfo.php/bella in a browser
If it is working all you should see displayed is /bella