Help with custom rewrites on faq.php like showwiki.php

**Kaelon** · December 27, 2012

Hi Pegasus, and Everyone!

I love VaultWiki's handling of the rewrites to turn /forums/showwiki.php?etc... into /wiki/ArticleName -- and I wanted to try and accomplish the same with vBulletin 3.8.x's built-in FAQ.php -- which currently resides at /forums/faq.php into /faq/faqname. What sort of rewrite rules should I be looking at?

I've tried permutations, at my /.htaccess (root), of:

Code:

RewriteRule ^forums/faq.php?faq=(.*)$ faq/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^faq$ faq/ [L,QSA,R=301]

With:

Code:

RewriteRule ^faq/(.*)?$ forums/faq.php?faq=$1 [L,QSA]

But when I go to /faq/name, I get an "Invalid Forum Specified" vBulletin message. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong and how I might get this there?

Thanks so much!

**pegasus** · December 27, 2012

If you're getting the invalid forum specified message, you are clashing with vBSEO. This is a design issue with vBSEO that I pointed out to them some years ago (and provided a fix) but they never made any change to it. There should be a RewriteCond above the vBSEO rules - you will have to add the /faq/ folder to the exclusion.

**Kaelon** · December 27, 2012

Originally Posted by pegasus

If you're getting the invalid forum specified message, you are clashing with vBSEO. This is a design issue with vBSEO that I pointed out to them some years ago (and provided a fix) but they never made any change to it. There should be a RewriteCond above the vBSEO rules - you will have to add the /faq/ folder to the exclusion.

Thanks so much, Pegasus. Can you please give me an example of what this exclusion looks like, and in which .htaccess it should be? I had a feeling it might be a vBSEO issue.

**pegasus** · December 28, 2012

I don't have a copy of the .htaccess on hand right now (we use nginx which has a different rewrite syntax). There should be a RewriteCond that excludes a number of folders including admincp, modcp, clientscript, and others directly before a RewriteRule with vbseo.php as its target. You want to add the faq/ folder to this exclusion.

**Alfa1** · December 29, 2012

This may be off topic, but why not use Vaultwiki instead of the FAQ? This way your community can create a very extensive FAQ that explains all functionality. vbulletin's FAQ is extremely limited.