What's more effective?

PHP Code:

http://www.vbseo.com/f4/ 


or

PHP Code:

http://www.vbseo.com/vbulletin-search-engine-optimization/ 


What`s your recommendation?

Yours, Silmarillion

Code:

http://www.vbseo.com/vbulletin-search-engine-optimization/

but then for threads:

Code:

 http://www.vbseo.com/f4/topic-about-vbulletin-search-engine-optimization/

its what i did

IMO, the name of the forum or thread should be in the url. That's the beauty of vbseo -- "content-relevant" urls. Your content is described in your url. There are plenty of other hacks out there that will let you do the website.com/f4 trick.

SE's have been known to typically offer better rankings for pages that are closer to your root url. So, for example, website.com/keyword.html is thought to be given greater weight than website.com/directory/keyword.html. However, for purposes of organization, I like to put my forum urls and my thread urls in a /forum directory, like this:

forum url: website.com/forum/forum-name-here.html
thread url: website.com/forum/thread-name-here-12345.html

If my entire site was a forum, and not a portal, I would put everything off of the root url, as in website.com/forum-name-here.html.