SSL and redirects

[Floyd R Turbo]

I recently transitioned hosting from GoDaddy to xfhost and from vBulletin to XF. I had an GoDaddy SSL installed and ran the entire VB site under it, had no problems doing it that way.

I had a horrible ordeal with DNS after the transition that Mike spent 2 hours getting fixed (GoDaddy blows). That was the biggest issue, so for the first week after transition, the site has been running without the SSL transferred. I did set up the redirect script immediately after XF installation, but since the SSL was not transferred, I could not test the redirect script. Any google links clicked resulted in an error regarding the length of the string or whatever.

The SSL cert has now been installed on xfhost. However, all my google links are prefaced with https since that's how they were on the old site. The result is that the links now find the site OK, but I get a 404 error.

For example, google this:

L2 algae scrubber site:www.turbosaquatics.com

All these links go to 404.

How do I fix this? Do I have to make the XF https throughout, and will that hose anything up since it has been running http for a week? Or should I do a 301 redirect in .htaccess, and leave the site http?

Is there any reason why I should or should not run the entire site secure?

I will eventually add a cart and that was the main reason I got the SSL in the first place.

 

[Floren]

Your redirects are wrong. Plus, you allow both unsecure and secure links.
http://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/
https://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/

You should use everywhere SSL and disable unsecure links, that's why you paid for the certificate.
Also, why you don't use XenForo's rewrite rules to have clean links?
https://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/index.php?forums/turbo-algae-scrubbers.19/

You should also rename the /forum to /community for sanity reasons:
https://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/forums/turbo-algae-scrubbers.19/

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I used the redirect instructions

http://xenforo.com/help/import-redirection/

when I installed it, so what happened that made them work incorrectly? That is my question.

regarding the other issues, I do not want anything called "community", community/forum or forum/community to me is just the same thing as forum/forum, but yeah no matter what it's an issue. Was not this way on vB, everything was just /{forum directory}/thread

One thing at a time though. I need to fix the redirects ASAP

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Gotta forgive me here, I have a basic programming background from when I was young but since high school nothing (that means I knew FORTRAN once) but working with computers for decades, this stuff I am pretty green at.

So in this

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-4-x-url-redirection.120/

which I did install then I follow the import redirection instructions, there is a section talking about the apache rewrites. But I have zero clue where these are supposed to go.

I did change the forum directory from /vb4 to /forum...that might be it

 

[Floren]

I'm referring to LiteSpeed redirects, nothing to do with XenForo. They redirect the old Google links to the new XenForo format. You should not need the XenForo script for that, some of the LiteSpeed experts correct me if I'm wrong. One thing is sure, you don't need it in Nginx.
Also, http://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/ should force a redirect to https://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/.

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I'm not following, remember newbie to php.

I tried adding this to my .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^/vb4/showthread.php /forum/showthread.php
RewriteRule ^/vb4/forumdisplay.php /forum/forumdisplay.php

that didn't work

I have no idea how to redirect all http to https

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I'm referring to LiteSpeed redirects, nothing to do with XenForo. They redirect the old Google links to the new XenForo format. You should not need the XenForo script for that...

Reading this again makes me totally confused. this ->http://xenforo.com/community/resources/vbulletin-4-x-url-redirection.120/ installed a file called 301config.php that you modify per your import table name and that is supposed to take care of it.

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I need to know something similar to what is posted in this thread
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/vb4-rewrite-rules-to-xenforo.60776/

Also I have a .htaccess file in my root dir (public_html) and my /forum dir. Dang it sucks being so green I have no clue what to do to fix this

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I don't have a flipping clue how to do any of this.

- force https
- redirect search engine links
- do the "clean links" thing

Someone please help. I think I've pretty much burned out Mike with all the DNS mess.

 

[Floren]

You should hire a professional, there are many people who have extensive knowledge here with LiteSpeed (I'm not one of them). Or at least ask your questions to Slavik's forum or official forums.

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

Can you point me to these forums then? I see Slavik on here but I don't know what you mean by "his forum" if it is on here

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

You should hire a professional, there are many people who have extensive knowledge here with LiteSpeed (I'm not one of them). Or at least ask your questions to Slavik's forum or official forums.

Looks like I'm going to have to do this now. I only changed .htaccess for a few minutes last night then reverted it back to the original file, but this morning all of my reply alerts go to 404. @$#%^@$#%

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I really don't get what happened. The reply e-mails have links that go to .com/index.php etc, and it was that way 2 days ago, and those worked fine. The links were actually at /forum/index.php but it worked. Now they all come up 404.

I momentarily added the 2 rewrite rules, then took them out because they didn't work. Then I momentarily removed the hashtag from this line in the .htaccess file in the xf root

   #   If you are having problems with the rewrite rules, remove the "#" from the
   #   line that begins "RewriteBase" below. You will also have to change the path
   #   of the rewrite to reflect the path to your XenForo installation.
   #RewriteBase /forum

which I had edited from the default file /xenforo to appropriately point to /forum, that didn't work so I added the hashtag back and that's the way it's been since. and now, all the links are hosed

 

[Floren]

Can you point me to these forums then? I see Slavik on here but I don't know what you mean by "his forum" if it is on here

Start a conversation with him.

 

[Slavik]

So let me make sure I follow this right

You imported from vb4 (withOUT vbseo)
You changed directory
You want to force the site to https.

Correct?

 

[Floren]

@Slavik the above you mentioned, his links are also broken in Google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.turbosaquatics.com algae scrubber

https://www.turbosaquatics.com/vb4/showthread.php?41-The-Turbo-L4-Algae-Scrubber
should redirect to:
https://www.turbosaquatics.com/threads/now-taking-orders-for-the-turbo-hf-algae-scrubber.185/

He messed up also the directory, I think he removed yesterday the /forum part from his URL:
https://www.turbosaquatics.com/forum/index.php?forums/algae-scrubber-diy.6/

Have fun.

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

got mike working on it.

 

[Slavik]

All you need to do is put the redirection scripts in the vb4 directory, with the configed to pick up the new xf directory.

Then place this in the htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

 

[Floyd R Turbo]

I have no vb4 directory. that was on godaddy. when I went to XF I switched hosts also, are you saying I should add a vb4 dir back in and redirect from there?

 

[Floren]

@Slavik, the ID's are changed. On vBulletin the thread ID was 41, while in XenForo is now 185. IMO, this is not going to work nice. Then again, I don't use the redirection scripts with Nginx.