I am still learning some of the in's and outs of design. I have some questions I need help with:

I accidentally set the whole SMF forum folder/all files to share the same 777 permissions....

Is there a way to set all the permissions back to the way they are suppose to be.

Also I wanted to know if it is better to convert to UTF-8 also?

In my HTML, I have the forum pointed to another domain I own (which is automatically forwarded to my main domain)
Is this smart or a real bad idea? Reason I did this is because, when I try to use coffeecup sitemap maker, it finds like 365 links, and 99% are all my SMF forum, but I only have 10 posts?
I need advice/help.


Also, looking at my FTP, what are you suppose to have your files and folders permissions set to? I see there is user, group and others, 777, 755, etc.


Thanks

Steve

It's not a good idea to set permissions at 777. this means owner, group, and users can all read, write, and execute every file in that directory.

You'll probably have to reinstall the SMF forum to go back to defaults. You only have ten posts so it's no big deal.

I have several domains hosted on the same hosting account. When someone types in url abc.com, they go to my root directory index. When someone types in url def.com, they go to my def directory index which is a sub directory of my root. The visitor never knows the difference.

This can be accomplished by redirects via your hosting control panel.

Ughhh I would hate to have to reinstall it. For now I changed the whole forum directory to 755, is this ok to leave it at? Or is it still better to start from scratch?

Also, so if I have my main web site as www.test.com, and within my html, I have the link to my forum pointing to www.test2.com which is 301 forwarded to www.test.com, is that ok? OR am I hurting the SEO of my forum information?
Is there any drawbacks from doing that?

Do you have any search engine problems with SMF and hundreds of links?


Thanks

I don't think 755 would hurt anything. You just don't want users to execute everything. But I'm not an expert on the matter so the best thing would be is to ask on the SMF site forum.

I really can't be of help on the SEO issue either. I have an SMF forum set in a sub directory as an example with only a couple of posts. I also have an active PHPBB forum in another sub directory that "club" members post to so I'm not concerned with search engine activity. Neither one comes up on the first two pages of a Google search.

Also I wanted to know if it is better to convert to UTF-8 also?

I use ISO-8859-1 and have no problems coding in HTML 4.0 in the English language. I got the following from Webmaster World or somewhere.

us-ascii = plain text (a-z, 0-9 no characters over ascii 127)

ISO-8859-1 = technical name for latin-1 or Western European which English falls under.

utf-8 = unicode that supports almost everything.

If you want to get dizzy reading the lowdown, here you go.

http://www.w3.org/International/tutoria … -char-enc/