vBulletin - Advanced Friendly URL's Fix

Hi There

Moved to another shared web hosting environment and found that my aMember / vBulletin combo had a problem on the new server. When trying to access vBulletin's forums there would be an error:

"No Input File Specified" error message, a blank white page with just this text appearing.

The problem turned out to be having Advanced Friendly URL's selected inside vBulletin causing the error message due to also having Multiviews turned on with the Apache server. To keep Advanced Friendly URL's turned on inside vBulletin, there is a solution.

This thread describes the issue.

The solution is to use .htaccess (in the root directory) to turn Multiviews off.

Code:

Options -MultiViews

Then to add a value to the PHP5.ini file (in the root directory)

Code:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Credit and explanation for this fix is described in the thread here.

Here are the screenshots showing where to turn Advanced Friendly URL's on inside vBulletin 4.





Hope this solution helps someone with the same problem.

Aly

There is an alternative solution if you don't wish to add this fix.

You can just use "Basic Friendly URLs" in vBulletin and that also removes the "No Input File Specified" error. However the Basic Friendly URLs format uses "?" characters in the URL construction. This can cause an issue if you are using the aMember redirect command for having more than one "?" will cause the amember_redirect_url function to fail.

Redirect Example:
http://www.yourwebsitename.com/members/login/?amember_redirect_url=$forumlink

In the $forumlink path if the URL is created is for example /forums/forumdisplay.php?postname
Having the "?" in the URL construct will cause the amember_redirect_url function to fail

By using the Advanced Friendly URLs in vBulletin
In the $forumlink path if the URL is created as /forums/forumdisplay.php/postname
Having the "/" in the URL construct will cause the amember_redirect function to correctly work as there is only one "?" character.

Just an FYI on why you might want to use Advanced Friendly URLs in vBulletin, apart from their obvious SEO benefit.

Aly