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#256825 04/16/2015 4:42 AM
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You'd think by now I'd have hit every combination of problems these forums could present to me smile. I will say up front that I am on IIS which I know most of you don't use.

I have to move hosts yet again. I've been using MyHosting the past six months ago and they have been beyond atrocious. I am trying to get everything off of them by Monday. Everything was going smoothly until I hit my UBB forum. Both systems are Windows Server 2012. I've got FastCGI and everything preset on this system and it seems in general to be running well.

If I use a non-spider-friendly URL like this it works -

http://www.romanceclass.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=425708#Post425708

but if I use a spider-friendly style it just goes to the forum homepage -

http://www.romanceclass.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/425717/Daily_Yoga#Post425717

I do have spider-friendly URLs enabled and have for several servers worth of moves now, so I'm not sure what's not set up here. I see it says

"Note: The PATH_INFO environmental variable must be available for this feature to function properly."

when I go into the PHP Info I have:

_SERVER["ORIG_PATH_INFO"] /forum/admin/phpinfo_iframe.php

but not just a path_info

I even went into my PHP.INI and made sure to have cgi.fix_pathinfo=1

Any ideas what I need to do to get this running? I don't want to turn off the URLs, they are being linked to.

Thanks!

Lisa

Last edited by BellaOnline; 04/16/2015 4:42 AM.

Lisa Shea, owner, BellaOnline.com
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I feel your pain.
Way back when, I was hosted on a windows server.
Never could get path_info to work after a server upgrade.
The it department was at a loss.
It finally got to every time I researched it ,it was a different fix and they obliged every time.
Some fixes were security risks.
The issue was it did work and they upgraded IIS and it stopped working.
It was years ago so I don't recall the versions.

As I recall it was something about fast cgi mapping.
The only difference for me is it was a shared hosting plan.
So I had to rely on it support to make changes
They told me they changed every setting I advised them about.

Anyway I finally moved to a linux server.
No more issues with Path_info.



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Inline with what Ruben mentioned, disabling FastCGI on my servers corrected a few issues I was having related to processing spider-firendly URLs. Because this was several years ago, I dont recall exactly what the problem was, but turning that off and using the default, fixed it. That server is currently running with PHP 5.4

Disable mod_fastcgi, and use mod_suphp instead.


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Hmmm that's odd because I've always specifically installed FastCGI for supposed speed benefits. So I've always had that on. And where my last move in October was from dedicated Windows 2008 to virtual Windows 2012, this time it's a straight sideways move from a virtual Windows 2012 to another virtual Windows 2012. I thought this should be the easiest move I've had.

I suppose on the up side I can open both servers up in remote desktop and go through the PHP.INI and IIS settings and see what could be different between them. I'l certainly willing to try turning off FastCGI if we think it'll help. Maybe on the more modern servers it isn't as critical as it used to be.

I'll report back if I figure out something.


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Oddly, this was fixed in ~7.2, then when Ian changed the URLs ~7.3 it was taken out accidentally and just never added back; but this should get you on track.


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Bella another item is we discussed this issue a long time ago.
And you found a redirect was a issue:
https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/230795/1


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2009?? You expect me to remember something I figured out back in 2009??? smile

I will have to update my "server move" notes to include some details on this smile.

Thanks!! Now to play with settings.


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OK I feel a bit better. The issue I hit in 2009 is not relevant today. So it wasn't that 2009 issue.

As to the Gizmo fix, my code already says

if ($var_sep != "&") {
$PATH_INFO = array_get($_SERVER, 'PATH_INFO', '');
if (!$PATH_INFO) {
$PATH_INFO = array_get($_SERVER, 'ORIG_PATH_INFO', '');


So it does already account for ORIG_PATH_INFO. I tried changing that top line to be explicitly ORIG_PATH_INFO and it doesn't help. Turning on spider-friendly URLs still doesn't work - it redirects users to the forum homepage.

On both servers .php is mapping to php-cgi.exe in IIS. So that's identical.

I'll dig into the PHP.INI tomorrow to see if it could be something in there.


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To be honest, I didn't open the page to look at the source of the current build to check the file out this AM; today was just a swamped day.

Do you happen to have a copy of your old configs, on the old server; maybe a comparison with the new will yield some results if it's an option?


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I zipped up the entire UBB system on the old one, FTPed it to the new system, and unzipped it. So everything is exactly the same on both systems in terms of the files.

I didn't move the PHP.INI though - I am just running the default one on the new server right now. So if something is different in there, that could be it. I'm now on PHP 5.5.11.

I'm not on the latest version of UBB - I'm one back - so I'm also going to upgrade tomorrow to see if that helps.


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hmmm OK I did the upgrade now, just in case, and it still doesn't like spider-friendly URLs smile. So at least I'm on the latest version. Will test more when I wake up.


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Hmmm how about this with the allowpath info variable? How would I set this?

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/handlers/add


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OK this is really odd. Some spider friendly URLS are now working –

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/...heap_silicone_wristbands_cust#Post359411

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php/topics/359408/1inch_silicone_wristband#Post359408


that was spam, but I was able to get to it via the URL.

But then there are others I can’t get to

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/...Freeeeeeeeeee_wristbands_here#Post359414

they just redirect.

But the post is there, you can see it with the ? format link -

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=359414#Post359414

Does that help to troubleshoot anything?

Lisa


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OK on this one which doesn't work

http://www.wineintro.com/wineforum/ubbthreads.php/topics/359409/Custom_wristbands,_custom_wris#Post359409

there's a comma in that URL and when I go in to edit it, to remove the comma, but leaving the rest, I get an error which says "Please shorten this text to 50 characters or less (you are currently using 53 characters) - so how did someone get this into the system in the first place? Did a spammer inject it in without using the form? Is that possible?


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AHA!!

I turned off the lowercase rule and they're working again.

This isn't a good long term solution because all the SEO papers I'm reading say it's important to have just one case, usually lowercase. Otherwise if Google can see different versions of the same file with different case they'll penalize you.

Is there something I can tweak in the URL interpreting area so it's not case sensitive, when it looks for a match?


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OK here's what I did:

FIND IN libs/ubbthreads.inc.php:

look for
$title = preg_replace("#(&(amp|gt|lt|quot);|[^a-zA-Z0-9_])+#", " ", $title);
$title = str_replace(' ', '_', trim($title));
$title = substr($title, 0, 30);

add
//LISA ADD 4/18/15 SO LOWERCASE URLREWRITE WORKS
$title = mb_convert_case($title, MB_CASE_LOWER, "UTF-8"); //convert to lowercase

That now works. It properly shows only lowercase URLs so then combined with my lowercase enforcement rule the system works. Can we please have this in the upcoming main code change, too? Is there anybody that actually wants mixed case to preserve?


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OK I take it back. There's still a problem because several links in here are hard coded with uppercase letters, like references to Board in the "New Topic" button - and those choke.

Why would we care if something is uppercase Board in that case?

I'm having to take off the IIS lowercase setting rule which isn't good.

Help!


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I'm not sure how to force the value to populate the path info variable in IIS; if it was Linux there could be some troubleshooting options, but I don't end up finding too many fixes to IIS problems via searches.

As for URLs with "unallowed characters"; in attempting to fix a security issue with v7.5.8, the developer (at the time), introduced coding which allows characters that are not allowed in a URL (see RFC3986), and instead of following requests to update the coding accordingly it was just left as is (basically breaking URLs in some instances).

Id242 created a modification shortly after the release of v7.5.8 (available at: [7.5.8] Better URL Sanitization for SEO), which is what will be used in v7.6.0 (it is not in v7.5.9). Users utilizing the UBB.Sitemaps script should note that the latest build is capable of parsing the 7.6.0 URLs (changelog), but will not utilize the v7.5.8+ URLs as they don't follow specifications.


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I did read that thread, and it does address the spider URLs being lowercase. That's where I found the fix I made to make them lowercase.

However, it doesn't address the issue that other code in the board has random letters in uppercase (like the B in Board) and for some bizarre reason if that lowercases the code breaks. Meaning if I turn on the website's "make things lowercase" script, which is important for SEO reasons, the forum breaks. So it's not just the URLs of the posts. There's other links within UBB that are mixed case and that for a reason I can't fathom have to be mixed case for the code to work smile.

I'm asking for that to be fixed, so the board works fine in all lowercase.

Lisa


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The linked code should force the URL to be all lowercase; this is the code that will be in 7.6.0; if it does NOT, and you're running JUST that code (no external coding will be utilized in the script source, and your rewrite code is outside of the scope of the UBB.threads coding), please alert me to which URLs are allowing uppercase letters.

The new URL encoding will:
Remove &,  , " (encoded &, " ", and the quote character)
Convert all characters to lowercase.
Remove non a-z0-9 characters and link them and spaces as -, as _'s are generally utilized a variable names, and not spaces.
Replace multiple instances of -'s with single ones (as the above steps could generate instances of ---)
Remove extra spaces at the beginning and end of the URL
Ensure the URL can be a max of 70 characters.

This coding has been active at UBBDev since it was first posted; I encourage you and anyone else that is curious how properly formed URLs should display (such as, no special characters as 7.5.8 allows).

If the uppercase letters you're referring to are the bookmarks (the #Bookmark bits after some posts) these are not read by search engines as a part of the URL as they're a local anchor within the page.

If the uppercase letters you're referring to are the non-spider friendly URLs (Board=12&Topic=345) these are out of the scope of the Spider Friendly/SEO URLs feature.


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I'm just getting back to this.

The specific problem is when I'm on a given post and for example go to Topic Options - New Reply. In that spider-friendly New Reply link, the /Number/ part of the URL is in uppercase.

So it's definitely a spider-friendly URL but a piece of it is in uppercase, and apparently needs to be uppercase, because it fails when I'm having my site in lowercase-only URLs.


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I know it's been a while but I'm still hitting this issue even with the new version of the board, now that I've installed it.

If I turn on my servers to enforce lowercase only, which is generally an important thing to do, I can't make new posts. The "B" in Board for making a new post has to be uppercase or the UBB code won't work.

If someone could tell me where to change that in the UBB code I'll do it - but I really think going forward the code should not be case sensitive on that B in board and/or it should be a lowercase B.

Thanks!


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Non-SE Friendly code is legacy and is no longer maintained (it's more involved to change a variable and would require more than just changing the letter; it'd have to adjust all associated coding for the variable); you should be running the SE Friendly coding, which will produce URLs that are made for Search Engines to process (and are all lowercase, no special characters allowed (?=;), are search engine optimized, etc). The Search Engine Friendly coding has been worked on extensively over the years.

The initial issue with this post was that your server wouldn't allow SE Friendly URLs to translate to their SE counterpart because the server didn't support the path_info variable:
Quote
If I use a non-spider-friendly URL like this it works - http://www.romanceclass.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=425708#Post425708
but if I use a spider-friendly style it just goes to the forum homepage - http://www.romanceclass.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/425717/Daily_Yoga#Post425717

By going to the specified URL it looks like the path_info variable is being produced and the link is not directing to your document root. Is there a reason that you're still trying to produce URLs with the non-SE friendly coding?


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