You will find this and other scripts mentioned in the post in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the HTML page code to see if it contains signatures of the forum engine. 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 you to download the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of a signature only added weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the greatest weight “won”. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

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

To get the list of forums, I used my Google parser. Queries like this were sent to the search engine

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

and so on. You will find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to zone.ru, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. Last time, it was difficult to conduct such a study, 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 Drupal sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, the engine was successfully identified on only 7,083, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I didn't take into account some engine? Was it really true that half of the forums had Bitrix installed? Or should I have spent more time searching for signatures? In general, additional research is required here.

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

They are followed with a large lag by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I wouldn’t recommend putting much faith in these numbers (they say that every third forum on the RuNet runs 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 greater the chances of finding 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, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent on it.

Scripts for searching/identifying forums can also find many practical applications. The first thing that came to my mind was to sort the identified forums by TIC and post on the first hundred posts with links to one of my sites. However, hundreds of forum dofollow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates have passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are not interested in transitions.

It is clear that the mentioned use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum for components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones that I just recently started using is Let's start a new SMF category with hopefully useful stuff. We start small, and as beginners it’s very useful.

First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: removing copyright and external links

Let me make a reservation right away that I only work with smf 2 and this article will relate specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I don’t like to put “10” external links to the official websites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we remove the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum/Themes/ name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php. Naturally, at the very bottom there is a code (about line 330) that displays external links that we don’t like so much. Therefore we delete: "

By selecting a specific topic to view, users are taken to a page with a list of messages in that topic.

Each individual message usually looks like this:

Typically, along the top and bottom of each page, a small menu will appear containing (depending on your forum settings) the following buttons:

• Answer- The most popular button with which users can leave new messages in a topic.
• Notify- Subscribe to receive notifications about new messages in this topic.
• Mark unread- You can mark the current topic as unread.
• Submit this topic- You can forward a link to the current topic to your friend/acquaintance by indicating his e-mail.
• Seal- Create a printed version of the page with the content of the current topic, for viewing before printing.

Typically, the list of messages in a topic is displayed in vertical order: old messages at the top, new ones at the bottom. But each user can set a different, horizontal order in his profile. Then new messages will be placed at the top. Each message in the list is divided into two sections. The left section contains brief information about the author of the message, and the right section contains the message itself.

• Author information
  • Author of the message- Nickname of the user (or guest) who left this message.
  • Signature above the avatar- Depending on the forum settings, users may have pre-created captions over their avatars or can set them themselves. Typically, this signature serves to individually “mark” users.
  • Main group- Most often, all users are in the Normal Users group, the name of which is not displayed. If the group is any other, its name will be displayed in this place. If the author of the message is a guest, a note about this will also be displayed here.
  • Group based on number of messages- Depending on the number of messages left, users are divided into different groups (Newbie, Guest, etc.). The name of this group may not be displayed if the user is a member of a special group or its display is disabled in the settings of the current theme.
  • Emblem- Usually the number of images in the emblem is set depending on the rank of the group (for example, beginners have 1 star, advanced users have three, veterans have five), or they use different images for different groups.
  • Number of messages- Displays the current number of messages of a specific user.
  • Icons for contacting the author- Display of various icons that help in one way or another to contact the author of the message: link to profile, link to website, ICQ number, e-mail, sending a personal message.
• Message block
  • Message icon- Individual icon selected by the author when creating/sending a message.
  • Message subject- The title of the message usually matches the title of the topic, but at the request of the author of the message it can be changed to any other.
  • Button panel- At the top of each message, in the right corner, a number of buttons are displayed that allow you to perform certain quick actions on the text of the message: quote, edit, delete, etc. (depending on the settings and installed mods). Most often, the “Quote” button is displayed; all other buttons are available only to the author of a specific message, as well as moderators and administrators.
  • date and time- The date and time the message was published is displayed directly below its subject. A warning about subsequent editing of the message will be displayed under its content and above the author's signature.
  • Text- Contents of the message (if there are no messages, then why a forum?)
  • Signature- If the user has specified his signature in his profile, it will be displayed here, under the text of the message.
  • Report to moderator- You can quickly report each specific message to the moderators (for example, complain if swear words are used in the message).
  • Recorded by- A mark indicating that the IP address of the computer used by the user or guest when sending the message is saved in the logs (in the database). For administrators (and for those who are allowed to do so), the IP itself is displayed next to this mark.

While these are the most common message elements when viewing threads, users can hide some of them by editing their profiles.