PhpBB vs Vbulletin vs xenforo

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

and, some of the biggest and busiest bulletin boards in the world are using phpBB and have been for years.

I have heard more negatives about xenforo than positives. granted that has been here on this board.

like most things in life, it is in the eye of the beholder.


robert

[TexTHKM]

and, some of the biggest and busiest bulletin boards in the world are using phpBB and have been for years.

I have heard more negatives about xenforo than positives. granted that has been here on this board.

like most things in life, it is in the eye of the beholder.


robert

Yeah there are some very successful phpBB driven boards, and I think that's really cool. My first forums were on phpBB, and I have lots of positive feelings about this software.
I just gave my experience, as I've used both Xenforo and phpBB. I can't speak for others.

As for negative things on Xenforo, I think it will come as no shock that of course most on this forum will be very positive towards phpBB..

[JLA]

I'd like to see any other forum platform challenge PHPBB on performance with the all same stats. I'd be willing to bet it would be PHPBB hands down in any such challenge.

[warmweer]

I've read positive things about Xenforo but haven't used it yet (nor am I planning to as the free boards). Reading through some board comparisons (free and proprietary) it does seem that the free boards get better reviews. I have had the opportunity to use an older version of VBulletin and it's in a minor league compared to phpBB.

[WWu777]

Has it been discussed?

Over and over again.

Where? I saw it mentioned once in this thread but it was dismissed. I searched for it on this board and saw a few other topics where it was brought up and also summarily dismissed.

In case you don't know, all the top SEO experts say that permalinks are still relevant and important in 2020. See these authoritative SEO blog articles below on that subject.

https://www.malcare.com/blog/permalinks-in-wordpress/

https://qodeinteractive.com/magazine/wh ... ermalinks/

https://neilpatel.com/blog/permalink-seo/

https://wplift.com/wordpress-permalinks

Neil Patel is the top blogger in SEO techniques. His blog on that is a must read. If you only have time to read one of them, read his link above.

create permalink URL's with topic titles or keywords in them

I've got news for you: based on how URLs work it is possible since day 1, and it is 100% customizable. Example:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2457961&z=PhpBB+vs+Vbulletin+vs+xenforo

As you see you can add as many parameters plus their values as you want and it still takes you to the topic whose ID is provided.

How do you do that AmigoJack? Is there a mod or extension? I'm unable to find one. Or a hack? If so, how do you install it? However, the permalink sample you gave above has the topic keywords too far at the back tail of the link. To be effective, the topic keywords have to be as close to the front of the link as possible, because beyond a certain number of characters in a URL, Google will ignore the words if they are too long. So they gotta be closer to the link, like right after the "/community" folder. For example, see this topic thread on Xenforo forums. Notice that the topic words come right after the forum folder.

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/h ... umb.12347/

That's the ideal way to have it. See what I mean?

I've searched for a mod or extension on phpbb that will rewriter URLs to make them permalinks, but haven't found any. Are any in development or planned? This is definitely a major factor in SEO. Has it been discussed?

Is it possible to even create a mod or extension that will rewrite all phpbb topic URL's into permalinks with topic titles in them?

If you have an extension you would like to see, please post in the Extension Requests forum. That being said, a quick Google search came up with this, however it was created for 3.1 and 3.2. If you decided to go this route, you will need to seek support from that user at GitHub.

Thanks. I'll post a request in the Extension Requests forum.

[AmigoJack]

How do you do that AmigoJack?
...
... too far at the back tail of the link. To be effective, the topic keywords have to be as close to the front of the link as possible, because beyond a certain number of characters in a URL, Google will ignore the words if they are too long.

I did it manually, just by using my understanding of HTTP and my keyboard. And if the position is relevant in all the SEO voodoo then just reorder parameters: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?z=PhpBB+vs+Vbulletin+vs+xenforo&f=64&t=2457961

What Xenforo (any many other software) does is basically allowing a more flexible URI at the cost of performance: if the URI pattern matches /thread/[^/]+\.([0-9]+)($|/) then it supposely is a thread. Which means I get the same site when requesting https://xenforo.com/community/threads/seo-voodoo-and-other-bullshed.12347/ - the performance hit is to analyze requested URIs per pattern to then be able to know which resource to execute and serve, in contrast to serve the site right away.

[JLA]

So are you saying for example that instead of:

http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=523151709

we should have something like

Code: Select all

http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?z=Prince_Charles_will_be_the_'best_prepared_monarch_Britain's_ever_had'_but...&t=523151709

????

[thecoalman]

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?z=PhpBB+vs+Vbulletin+vs+xenforo&f=64&t=2457961

This defeats the primary reason(IMO) to do this which is to make it easily readable for human. Good SEO practices are usually good human practices. The other problem is that it's duplicate URL. If you are going to do SEO you should be trying to eliminate duplicate URL's not creating them.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/phpbb-vs-vbullentin-vs-xenofor-t123456

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

sorry but you do not "need" any of this for SEO. google does not really care about this issue. google also is smart enough to know what duplicate content is and it does not consider this type of thing duplicate content.


once again ask google when you have questions about what google does or does not want.
many, in not most of the so called SEO experts on the net are at best working off of information that is several years old.


robert

[thecoalman]

sorry but you do not "need" any of this for SEO. google does not really care about this issue. google also is smart enough to know what duplicate content is and it does not consider this type of thing duplicate content.

Google very much cares about duplicate URL's because they don't want to be banging away at content only to find they already indexed it. It's a waste of resources for both the server owner and Google. The canonical URL helps solve this but that only occurs after the page is loaded. If you have consistent URL's consistent with the canonical URL the bot can expend more resources indexing new content or re-indexing old content. This should be common sense.

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

according to what I read from google some time back, the whole point of worrying about duplicate content was when people were actually creating duplicate sites trying to scam the search engines.
the type of duplicate content you are talking about is not actually duplicate content. google understands perfectly how dynamic sites work and as far as I know does not consider it duplicate content.


robert

[thecoalman]

Google considers it duplicates and will list it in the search console as duplicate, they don't list pages with canonical URL as duplicate. They won't penalize a site unless they determine it's done for unscrupulous reasons. In fact they suggest you don't block it with robots.txt so they can determine it's duplicate. There is also option in the search console to indicate to Google parameters that can be ignored.

That's besides my point. When you have consistent URL's consistent with the canonical URL it's to your benefit and the bots some of which may not be as smart as Google. It should be common sense that if bot makes X requests to your site you want them requesting as much unique content as possible.

[WWu777]

Check out what Artodia (aka Arty), one of the major designers of phpbb and Xenforo forum themes, said about phpbb vs. Xenforo. What do you all think?

https://www.artodia.com/threads/phpbb3-vs-xenforo.1492/

phpBB is the best from free forum software world, XenForo is the best forum software overall. phpBB 3.1 is a major step forward, but it is still years behind XenForo.

First and most important is plugin system: in phpBB (and almost all other forum software) add-on author can add code only in specific places and its rather awkward system. XenForo uses classes for everything and those classes can be extended. Add-on author can extend almost any class and change/add functionality. Same class can be extended by multiple add-ons without causing conflicts (major thing that no other software has done so far).

Similar situation in templates: in phpBB 3.1 mod author has access only to few predefined places, in XenForo anything can be modified using several methods: template replacements (search/replace in any template, including regexps and callback replacements), XF has events for changing template content before and after its compiled.

So its way easier to make pluging for XenForo than any other software and almost anything can be done with it.

But users don't care about any of that. They want forum that is easy to use. From my experience XenForo is years ahead of anything in that department as well. That is very subjective. Best people to test it is those who have no clue about computers, so I've tested that on sewing forum that has about 250k posts and almost 20k users who have are computer illiterates. That forum used to run phpBB, more than a year ago switched to XenForo. Number of support requests have changed from 3-4 a week to 1 a month. Ladies love it. Easy to use WYSIWYG editor, their favorite Facebook login, option to "like" post that they abuse, posting images is much easier. Of course all of those features can be added to phpBB, but its not an easy task, especially WYSIWYG editor that doesn't suck.

Is that true? Is phpbb years behind Xenforo? If so, when will phpbb catch up? And why is it behind? Surely the developers at phpbb have all the latest knowledge in server technology, coding, HTML and software design right?

[WWu777]

I did it manually, just by using my understanding of HTTP and my keyboard. And if the position is relevant in all the SEO voodoo then just reorder parameters: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?z=PhpBB+vs+Vbulletin+vs+xenforo&f=64&t=2457961

What Xenforo (any many other software) does is basically allowing a more flexible URI at the cost of performance: if the URI pattern matches /thread/[^/]+\.([0-9]+)($|/) then it supposely is a thread. Which means I get the same site when requesting https://xenforo.com/community/threads/seo-voodoo-and-other-bullshed.12347/ - the performance hit is to analyze requested URIs per pattern to then be able to know which resource to execute and serve, in contrast to serve the site right away.

AmigoJack,
I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean you did it manually? You mean you just typed the words in the permalink? But isn't the whole point of this is to have a mod or extension that REWRITES all the forum URL's automatically to make them more SEO friendly and rank higher in Google? How do you install a program or mod that automatically rewrites the URL's to something like the examples you gave? Any idea?

Also, can the mod or extension provide a redirect so that all internal links will automatically redirect to the new permalinks? Is that even possible? The Xenforo forum support doesn't mention anything about that. Is that possible in theory?

What about this GitHub mod here?
https://github.com/phpbb-seo/usu

Does that do what I requested? How do you install it? The same way you install other phpbb extensions? Has anyone here ever tried it before? Did it work ok? Does it work with phpbb3.3?

[thecoalman]

I'd strongly caution against using SEO mods/extensions that change the URL structure. It's not something you can simply disable if a phpBB update breaks it. If the mod author abandons it or is slow to update it you are left swinging in the wind.