free beer

[color="darkblue"] need help to install Advanced Guestbook, and will shout you a beer for your troubles.
if you can come to sunny Queensland Australia I will join you in a xxxx
else I will paypal, or whatever, money today if you can solve my problem.
1) I know very little about php and nothing about mysql
2) I have used advanced guestbook on hosting accounts where it was a one click install but this host does not include it (they are more the full on php nuke).
3) any way I have uploaded the files and set permissions on /adminand /tmp.
4) created a db by clicking blindly in plesk control panel.
5) edited /admin/config.inc.php to read:

this seems to have worked, I had to change it when my first two attempts were wrong, and watched the error messages playout in my browser.
6) till I reached Error Number: 1146 Table 'spec.book_config' doesn't exist,
I assume this means that I have not set the tables in my db and was hoping that some thirsty folk would show me how.
7) I can send you ftp password but ask that you not only fix it but explain how you did it.

Thanks, & it's my Wally Grout (shout).
Ben from Oz[/color]

Have you tried running install.php after setting up the config file to
create the database, tables and fields?

I owe you a beer Auron.

Sorry to get of the subject but I am worried about googlebot she has stopped spidering our main site 48 hours now when normally visits twice a day, also backlinks have been up and down. solve me the algorithm and I by you the pub.

I read somewhere googlebot goes round the web visiting sites and you'll
get a visit from the bot every 30-45 days or something like that. So long
as you have one page linking to all the others googlebot will be able to
get all of your site.

The easiest way to do this is create a file with links to
every other useful page on your site and then go to google' homepage
and add that url to their list of sites to spider thus kind of making sure
you whole site gets spidered and listed.

Auron

certainly what you say about linking is correct, but i must disagree with how often googlebot visits, If your site is highly ranked and has regularly changing content she will visit daily or even mmore

Talking about the Googlebot...

It's supposed to be denied from my guestbook by a robots.txt file and also noindex nofollow meta-tags but it's still indexing the pages. I thought Googlebot was supposed to be well behaved and follow orders. Any suggestions for blocking it and other bots.

As for frequency of visits, looking at site stats for Aug - the Googlebot visited the high ranking main pages between 1 and 4 times a day and reindexed the entire site on the 1st, 17th and 30th with most pages only being visited during a full index. New pages seem to take a while (up to 8 weeks) for an initial visit but are then revisited about every 2 weeks. It also paid 4000 short visits to the site indexing between 1 and 100 pages at a time.

As for the algorithm - try solving the meaning of life, it'll be a lot easier.

Trevor

try adding
to head tag

how does one edit images and change the order of entries?

Hey, Trevor.

I got that you are already using the above meta tag. Found the following link on the Internet for blocking bad bots that don't follow the rules. Haven't tried it myself yet, but I plan to.

http://www.clockwatchers.com/robots_bad.html

The above tutorial is for Blocking robots via .htaccess

a robots.txt file must be in the root directory to work, i can not see http://proxy2.de/robots.txt and i can not see a robots meta tag in this doc?

I have got my guestbook working on new site except for thumbs, how do I get Image Magick or PHP's GD extension happening

Trevor wrote:Talking about the Googlebot...

It's supposed to be denied from my guestbook by a robots.txt file and also noindex nofollow meta-tags but it's still indexing the pages. I thought Googlebot was supposed to be well behaved and follow orders. Any suggestions for blocking it and other bots.

benwalsh wrote:a robots.txt file must be in the root directory to work, i can not see http://proxy2.de/robots.txt and i can not see a robots meta tag in this doc?

benwalsh, we aren't speaking of the proxy2.de site. We are just here sharing what we learned while setting up Advanced Guestbook and Advanced Poll on our own sites.

benwalsh wrote:I have got my guestbook working on new site except for thumbs, how do I get Image Magick or PHP's GD extension happening

If it really is a GD extension issue, maybe you need to ask your host about. But first you might want to make sure you didn't overwrite something. Did you customize the guestbook? Maybe post a link here so someone can look at the code.

Trevor wrote:Talking about the Googlebot...

It's supposed to be denied from my guestbook by a robots.txt file and also noindex nofollow meta-tags but it's still indexing the pages. I thought Googlebot was supposed to be well behaved and follow orders. Any suggestions for blocking it and other bots.

Trevor

Found some more interesting information, so I made a separate topic for this:

http://proxy2.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3643

Got to do something. These bots are eating up my bandwidth.

The 30-45 days figure i quoted should of been how long it takes
googlebot to spider your site after submitting it to them. How often
they spider your site changes. The more people who link to you
will allow googlebot to follow those links back your site again and
again.

Me personally I dont mind googlebot. It is the other bs bots I dont want.

Should be grateful it was only 48 hours. Googlebot used to spider my site about 30 times a day then suddenly it stopped. Three months went by without a single hit from googlebot except when I faked my useragent to check it wasn't blocked. I emailed Google and they said nothing was wrong and my site wasn't banned or anything. After four months google bot started to return in trickles and is now back up to about 30-40 visits a day.

Trevor wrote:Talking about the Googlebot...

It's supposed to be denied from my guestbook by a robots.txt file and also noindex nofollow meta-tags but it's still indexing the pages. I thought Googlebot was supposed to be well behaved and follow orders. Any suggestions for blocking it and other bots.

Trevor

There is no guarantee it was really googlebot. I myself have spoofed the googlebot useragent when testing various sites and I know some people always spoof it. The real googlebot will honour any orders placed in a robots.txt file as will most bots. Email harvesters wont honour this though. The only 100% certain way to block bots is by writing a php script that gets the user agent string and recognises every known bot. Upon recognising a bot stop loading the page. Place this in every page and the bots will just leave your site.