I am trying to make my forum more SE friendly by using mod_rewrite to rewrite the urls into something a little easier for the SE's to spider...

But...


Im having some problems with it.

I followed a tutorial at: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15996

Ive done exactly what it said (im only at the start when errors start happenning).

I inserted the following into a .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteBase    / 
RewriteRule    viewpost/([1-9]+?[0-9]*)\.html$     viewtopic.php?p=$1#$1 [NE,L] 
RewriteRule    viewtopic/([1-9]+?[0-9]*)\.html$    viewtopic.php?t=$1    [L] 
RewriteRule    viewforum/([1-9]+?[0-9]*)\.html$    viewforum.php?f=$1    [L]

all it came up with was server error 500.

I have got mod_rewrite enabled on the server, ive alreday asked my host about it.

Any ideas?

Have a look in your error log. Usually they have more details about what caused the problem.

ive been told its something to do with a regex error...any ideas?

I'd say you should just move to Invision Power Board; I don't think that it uses Session IDs and therefore can be properly indexed by Google and other search engines which usually will more or less ignore pages with sids.

Not to mention phpBB is 3 times the size of IPB, and takes up lots more bandwidth (from what I've heard).