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The vBulletin 4 project is progressing quickly and we are in a position to share some further information about what to expect in our next new major version release.

In August, we announced a major overhaul of the code base. Rather than targeting all of these changes in a single, long-term release, we intend to accomplish all the planned improvements over a number of versions. In order to achieve this goal, the largest vBulletin development team ever assembled is now working within an Agile development process, allowing us to deliver new features into your hands faster.

Each incremental release in the vBulletin 4 series will include improvements in features, usability and architecture. Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.

The goal of the vBulletin 4 series is to develop a modern, scalable application platform that will allow your communities to thrive.

Key features and improvements that will be included in the first vBulletin 4 release are:

• Cross-content search system providing a single interface to search across forum posts, blog entries and comments and other supported products
• Improved search performance
• A fresh design and layout making use of semantic markup and CSS styling
• An enhanced style and template system to enhance your ability to change the layout
• Controls to assist with the placement of advertising elements
• SEO features, including friendly URLs
• A centralized attachment system, allowing the sharing of attachments across products

Alongside significant strides forward within the vBulletin forum product, we are also producing a new content management system to facilitate the creation, editing and publishing of non-forum pages. Further details about CMS features, and how it will integrate with vBulletin will be posted in due course.

We are working hard and plan to have vBulletin 4.0 released in beta form in early Q2 of 2009.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continuing support of vBulletin. We are really excited about version 4, and we’re looking forward to bringing you further updates via general announcements and periodic development blog posts focusing on individual areas.

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Today, the vBulletin team is proud to declare version 3.8.0 to be our stable, supported release.

vBulletin 3.8.0 is available immediately from the Members’ Area to all customers with active vBulletin licenses, and will be offered as the primary choice to those making new purchases. We recommend that all customers with active licenses upgrade to vBulletin 3.8.0.

Google AdSense Integration

vBulletin 3.8 features a control panel to allow you to quickly add Google AdSense advertising units to your forum and monetize your site traffic!

To get started, please visit the members’ area and either sign up for a new Google AdSense account or assign your existing account with vBulletin.com. Once you have linked your members area account to your Google AdSense account, all vBulletin downloads will include the advertising control panel. (It will not be included unless you do this.)

From the control panel, you can choose an advertising package that contains the amount and type of ads that you want to feature - and deploy it instantly with just a couple of clicks. The positions and ad unit types chosen for each package are designed to give the maximum possible revenue for your site. Text-based advertising units will automatically inherit the color schemes of any styles you have on your board. Should you wish to experiment with the different ad packages, you can change your mind on deployed package at any time, including the option to remove ads completely.

For more information about this feature, please visit the vBulletin members’ area.

New Features in 3.8

There are many new features and improvements to existing functionality in vBulletin 3.8.0 over vBulletin 3.7.x. Here is a brief list of just a few of the highlights.

• Social group discussions
• Social group categories
• Private message sorting and filtering
• Private message history
• Quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments)
• Social group icons
• Social group transfers
• Private message quick reply
• Private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period)
• Private message reporting
• Profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users)
• Lightbox navigation
• Thread prefix permissions
• Dismissible notices

A full and detailed list is available in Darren’s blog.

Support for 3.7

This release supersedes the 3.7 branch as our primary product. Active maintenance of 3.7, including fixes for functionality breaks and security problems, will continue for approximately six months (to 1st July 2009), after which only security fixes will be released. Upon the release of vBulletin 4.1, the 3.7 branch will be end-of-life’d and no further security fixes will be made available and customers will be advised to upgrade to vBulletin 3.8 or newer in order to gain fixes.

PHP and MySQL Requirements

vBulletin 3.8.0 requires at least PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16 (These are the same requirements as vBulletin 3.7), but we strongly recommend that all customers run PHP 5.2.8 with APC and MySQL 5.1.30 or later. Major performance benefits can be had by taking the recommended route rather than simply satisfying the required versions.

What is a ‘Gold’ Version?

When talking about software, the term ‘gold’ is not related to the color of the application. Rather, it refers to the practice of burning the final version of a software product to a CD-R so that it can be sent to a large scale CD press for large-scale distribution. It is used to indicate that the code is ready for deployment to customers. The official name of this new version is vBulletin 3.8.0.

Installing or Upgrading vBulletin

Anyone who has installed or upgraded any version of vBulletin 3 before will be familiar with the process, but for those who are new to the system, the vBulletin manual has all the details for installing and upgrading.

Template Changes

A large number of templates have been changed when compared with vBulletin 3.7.x. It will be necessary to revert affected customized templates or otherwise carefully integrate the changes into your custom versions or new features and existing functionality will be adversely affected. A complete list of the templates you have customized whose original version has been changed by the 3.8.0 upgrade is available within your Admin Control Panel after the upgrade is complete.

Bug Reports

As with any software, bugs will appear. If you find a problem that you believe to be a bug, please don’t post about it on the forums where the development team may never find your message, but instead use the dedicated bug tracker to make a report that can be tracked through to completion.

Before reporting a bug, please ensure you are able to reproduce the problem on a board using a default, uncustomized style with all plugins disabled.

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When building up your forums, many people think that people will just come out of no where and be willing to post. No! To lure people to hit that sacred register button, you will need some incentive. Then it’s even harder to get people to make that first post! After a couple of posts, it will generally become a lot easier for that new member to become an active member. Today I will provide you with a couple of tips to help increase your forum activity and registration turn over rates.

1. Content. Content is always key, now I don’t mean by copy and pasting info from another website and calling that content. Original and UNIQUE content. That is what draws people to your website. If you run a car forum and you always have the latest info on all sorts of cars, people will start visiting you more often to see if you have any updates. If you always are displaying content a few days later than other places, it will become boring and visitor rate will drop. From experience, your content always looks better with images. “a picture is worth a thousand words” now, that is true, believe it or not, there are many people who click a link because the image that came with it was intresting to them or caught their interest. So why not give it a try and start creating custom content!
2. Visit some blogs related to your forums and make a couple comments. Add your link to your comment but do not spam! Spam will only cause your comment to deleted. Write a nice constructive comment and that will help you build your links. (You can feel free to comment here if you wish).
3. Setup Syndication features (RSS). I’m sure all major forum systems have this and by setting up an RSS and publishing it to places such as blogs, other forums, etc it will help get any new content you create out to the world.
4. Use Yahoo Q/A. If you can find questions related to your forums, provide  a nice anwser and then add your website to the source! This can generate great amounts of traffic if done correctly.
5. Submit your quality and unique content to Digg.com Don’t spam though or they will block and suspend your website from ever submitting anything again.

Follow these guide lines and you should see improvments to your forum in a couple of weeks. Sometimes, visitor rate can be improved in a couple of days by just submitting your content to the right places! Good luck!

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Now, we all know that search engines such as Google and Yahoo can bring in a lot of traffic depending on your placement. We all want to get more visitors right? You can improve your “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization in a few simple steps if you use vBulletin.

Continue reading…

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Here are some tips you might find usefull for phpBB 2.
First I recommend you install the hack to remove SID’s, this will make it possible for search engines to index your site.
Next I reccomend you Install this hack. http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=200361
You should also install this hack http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=152036
You should also install the following hacks.

• http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=275578
• http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=200153
• http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=231920
• http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=91228
• http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=44957

You should also create a robots.txt and use it to keep it from going to pages like groupcp.php

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