Switching from forum[dot] to /forum - best approach?

[OzSpeedway]

I am considering doing the switch from my forum on a subdomain to having it under my main site.

The problem, however, would be the links inside posts that point to forum.australianspeedway.com and how to get them to point to australianspeedway.com/forum.

There is also the issue of Google and what it has in terms of forum[dot].

Can anyway suggest ways to cover both of the above issues.... or should I just stay with what I have got....

Cheers
Bruce

[briansol]

there's a couple steps you need to do to do this.
Assuming you aren't actually moving folders, and are simply removing the submain (ie, forum. subdomain points to public_html/forum folder on your doc tree)

place the following in your forum folder htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^forum\.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/forum/$1 [L,R=301]

If you use www's, change line to to include it on the domain.com

Now, you need to spoof google into thinking forums.domain.com still exists.
If you just kill the subdomain, going to forums.domain.com will get a 404/ invalid / etc page.

You need to create a NEW subdomain, called forums. BUT, you need to point it to a dummy folder. you can call it whatever you want besides a folder that already exists, including /forum

so, forum.domain.com will really load public_html/newfoldername/

Inside this folder, direct as above in an htaccess (the only file needed in the entire folder)

Rewrite Engine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/forum/$1 [L,R=301]

you can't do this natively in cpanel. It only allows for subdomain. to /subdomain folder point. you will have to login into ssh apache config.

That should do it. None of your links will break, there's no content/folders to move.
The tricky part is just setting up the new subdomain to include the new folder referenced by the old sudomain name.

[OzSpeedway]

Excellent, thanks Brian

Just on the forums. vs forum. Could I also just rename the public_html/forum subdir to public_html/forums, create another directory called forum and leave forum.australianspeedway.com there. The subdomain should still pickup the new forum directory where the .htaccess file would be doing the redirects....

If all this works out, I will do the same with gallery.australianspeedway.com and redirect things to australianspeedway.com/gallery...


Cheers
Bruce

[briansol]

yup, if you want to do that,

leave subdomain as is.
rename /forum to /forums
re-create /forum and make the htaccess

Rewrite Engine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

that should do it

[briansol]

as for your gallery... it might be a little trickeier, as "gallerys" is just, well, dumb and not english so you may need to come up with something else to use, maybe /pics or /photos or even keyword it, /speedwaygallery or something

[OzSpeedway]

yup, if you want to do that,

leave subdomain as is.
rename /forum to /forums
re-create /forum and make the htaccess

Rewrite Engine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

that should do it

Ah, of course - thanks

as for your gallery... it might be a little trickeier, as "gallerys" is just, well, dumb and not english so you may need to come up with something else to use, maybe /pics or /photos or even keyword it, /speedwaygallery or something

Agree, gallerys is just plain dumb although galleries.... nah...

But I do like speedwaygallery, gonna use that one

[OzSpeedway]

I took the plunge tonight and switched from a subdomain to a subdirectory for my forum. I created the .htaccess file as above and everything works brilliantly from the browser address bar....

But I was wondering.... will any links embedded in posts automatically work with both the .htaccess redirection AND VBSEO urls?

Cheers
Bruce

[briansol]

the links in posts will point to the old area, and thus will get redirected by the htaccess real-time.