Rel=nofollow in MyBB’s links

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:30:33 +0000

Yesterday I had to do some cleaning on the low-traffic Wiki4Games BBS, running MyBB. Basically the spammers registered accounts which never posted (so I barely noticed those account creations) and had a few (usually 1 or 2) spam links in their signature. In case you start thinking a spam signature is harmless as long as you don’t post with it, let me remind you that the signature appears on the user’s profile. So it gets seen by you-know-who-who-browses-everywhere. I found a MyBB mod to nofollow user websites, but no equivalent for signatures. I don’t think it’s easily feasible to nofollow specifically the links in the signature, so I went for the parser, i.e. I tried to nofollow all links posted within a [url] tag (NB: this also works on URLs posted without the url tag, as long as they’re identified as url by the parser). No further ado, here it is:

Open inc/class_parser.php
In function mycode_parse_url, find:
$link = "$name";
Replace it with:
$link = "$name";

Save, upload, and you’re done.

As for the website URL from the website field, well, do as indicated on this tutorial, which summarizes as: add rel=nofollow in the postbit_www template. Or, better (this will also deal with the website on the user profile page and not just on the “www” button), install the previously mentionned NoFollow Website Links extension.

Controling signature size in MyBB

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:09:32 +0000

Today on the Wiki4Games BBS I had to deal with a way too large user signature. Eventually, I came up with several ways to solve the problem:

At first I installed a plugin called Image signature Limit. I don’t know for sure if it works fine, as I didn’t test it specifically. The problem with this plugin is that it doesn’t fix signatures which have been created in the past, and also it only takes care about the pictures, not the text size. So I left it enabled to prevent further submissions of too huge sig pictures, and I looked after another solution: manual style edits.

In MyBB you can edit templates and styles from the admin panel. Of course this is very tedious if you use several templates, but luckily for me I use only one, so this solution is good for me.

open the postbit_signature template. Its content should be:
{$post['signature']}
Replace it with
{$post['signature']}
open global.css and add:
.signature img {max-width:600px; max-height:150px; overflow:hidden;} .signature {border-top: 1px solid #aaaaaa; width:100%; margin-top:1em; padding-top:0.2em; max-height:200px; overflow:hidden;}

That’s it. You can change the maximum height and width you want, of course. We also replaced the very ugly

with a lighter 100% width border, of course this part is optional, it’s not needed to limit the signature size but very needed to give a decent look to the board IMO. The max-height and max-width attributes are, as far as I know, part of the CSS 2 specification, and work on Firefox, Opera, Safari, MSIE 7+.

This “tutorial” was tested using the Default theme on MyBB 1.4.7. At the time I’m writing you can view the result on http://bbs.wiki4games.com.

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Rel=nofollow in MyBB’s links

Controling signature size in MyBB