The Quest for Spiderable URLs

[jomaxx]

Okay, I've spent umpteen hours researching this and I can't find good forum software that creates pseudo-static URL's. I'm on the verge of putting a forum onto a large and busy site, and I'm going to do whatever I can NOT to have to change software or page name standards once I get the forum up and running.

All the developers seem incredibly patronizing on this issue. They're being dragged into it by their customers. They seem to think it's all a distasteful aberration called Googlemania, instead of acknowledging that dynamic URLs are incredibly difficult for any possible search engine to spider and index effectively. This has been obvious for years.

In addition to SEO, I'm loking at software that 1. has a very simple end user interface; 2. is fast and scalable; 3. is somewhat customizable so that I can integrate it with the main portion of my site.

I run Apache and have things like SQL and mod_rewrite available. I've gone to the trouble of installing & configuring & even customizing 3 packages so far, with mixed results at best. Here's what I have figured out so far:

MiniBB
- spider-friendly URL is possible, using a hack and mod_rewrite IIRC
- customizing possible
- simplest and best interface, IMO, HOWEVER...
- doesn't appear to be too scalable
- no ability to verify email address by sending the user a password or activation URL; I wasn't planning on doing this right away, but I would hate to need this capability and not have it

YaBB
- have reduced URL parameters to one, which is better but not what I'm looking for (it may or may not be a big difference, but there's not question in my mind that zero parameters is better than one parameter)
- customizing possible
- no search engine mods are available - a major new version is in beta, so mods may be a while if they ever come

SMF
- capability exists but it requires a special configuration of PHP. Even if I could get my server configured this way, the change affects filaname paths and file permissions, and will likely break all my existing coding
- no alternative mods appear to exist

vBulletin
- best reputation overall
- static URLs are available for an "archive" version of the site, which seems like a very lame and half-assed solution
- I found 23-page thread on how to SEO vBulletin, but vBulletin is in also beta so making the changes manually seems like a neverending headache
- there is also an SEO add-on in closed beta

This post is as much to organize my thoughts as anything else, but I really do need to know if I'm missing anything obvious. So far my gut feeling is that I'm best off buying vBulletin and getting the SEO mod as soon as possible. Comments?

TIA

[jomaxx]

BTW, I found a mod to fix the URL's on the most recent version of vBulletin, so I'll probably pay the license fee in order to install and test vBulletin.

[encyclo]

I understand the frustration - it is not easy to find a decent forum package with rewritten URLs available in any shape or form. vBulletin is one of the best boards around, and well worth the fee. The mod will probably take some tweaking, but this is going to happen in all cases.

The only other option that I'm aware of is phpBB, where there are a couple of good third-party mods available for static-looking URLs and other SEO-related enhancements. You might want to test that too.

[chopin2256]

You should check out my forum if you want. I have invision board, $70 for the license, and the mod was awesome in changing all the dynamic links into html files. The mod even changes the name of every page to "key-word.html" which I don't think that happens in VBulletin. Furthermore, invision board is intuitive, and has tons of mods, including one to integrate the website into the forum. If you want my site information pm me, and I will give you the link to my site.