vBulletin Mods

I registered on your site just now. If you can give me temporary admin access, I can take a look at your definitions directly.

Someone mentioned that Rapidshare wasn't working. I tested it and I'm not having an issue. I would need specific links that are not converting to troubleshoot the issue.

I see there were a lot of requests in the last few months for new sites. Hopefully you also directed those requests to the definitions request area on my site.

Sorry, I was gone this evening.
Your account is been upgraded to admin with some rights. Let me know if you need more rights and which ones.
But I thing the one you have should do the trick.

This is a carryover moved to this thread on DJ's request. I'm finding that the Amazon definition only works for certain types of Amazon links. For example, if you search an item on Google and copy the hyperlink from the results, it usually works fine. That is generally because the link is relatively short, ending in the product ID number, and so the definitions parse and append the affiliate tag ?tag=yourtag-20 correctly.

The problem is with other links, like those you often get from a search at Amazon.com. These results have longer URLs, usually containing a ? in them, like the phrase ?ie=UTF . If you append the affiliate tag above, like the one included in the definition, it does not validate. In this case, if you append the tag &tag=yourtag-20 it does validate.

You can't simply change to &tag, though, because it won't validate with the shorter Amazon URLs. Yes, if you do the URLs yourself, you can always get it to work, but the point is that you want it to automatically append a valid tag to any amazon link a member posts and you don't know what type of format it will have.

So far, my solution is to append the following tag to any type of Amazon URL:

?tag=yourtag-20&tag=yourtag-20

This seems kind of redundant, but so far it has validated in the Amazon link checker utility on all the tests I've tried, including when it gets redirected to a mobile site on a phone.

Anyone have a better definition than this common one posted by BirdOPrey5?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showp...postcount=1405

Do you have any custom definitions installed? I don't see any. We need to do a complete wipe of your definitions and add a new set, but I don't want to delete anything you had customized and needed to keep.

Due to some bad record keeping (or lack thereof) I can't quite tell if I updated Amazon since the last posted update. Let me verify what your saying, though. Are you adding the tag to the URL your posting, or is this tag in the definition itself? If your using my Amazon defs, my old Amazon tag is still in there, so it would need to be edited. As I recall, if you don't take my tag out and try to use appended tags when posting, you run into that issue.

If not, can you give me some of the links in question you've run into problems with so I can test them. I know I worked on Amazon recently and made some significant changes to the RegEx, but I can't quite remember what that was due to the aforementioned poor record keeping.

I already wiped them and reinstalled the ones from this thread yesterday, but you can do it again if you want.
I don't have any custom definitions installed, so go ahead.;)

The only custom definition is a youtube custom bbcode which was made last week, but that should not be of any influence. This will be removed when Ame is working again.

Okay, you have something going on deeper than just a definitions issue. When I wiped your definitions set, the post still tried to convert. With no definitions. That's definitely not normal. I suspect something happened during your installation. What I suggest you try to do is reupload all the files again and reimport the product as if you were doing an upgrade. Delete the default definitions, then do a test post, with no definitions installed, and see if it still tries to convert. If so, you may need to uninstall and do a clean install.

Hmmz... strange. The only thing I did the last time was an upgrade to the new version.
I will try your suggestions again sometime this evening and keep you informed. Thanks for the help!

I am using the same definition as BirdOPrey posted in that link that I think is the same as yours (unless you updated since my last download), except, of course, I substitiuted my affiliate tag in the replacement box.

So, for example, the AME replacement validates fine for me with this link found via Google searching for "nuclear duct tape"

http://www.amazon.com/3M-8979N-Perfo.../dp/B000NG3ZKI

It does not validate if I copy the same search results from Amazon and get this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/3M-8979N-Perfo...1492788&sr=8-5

Now, if I change the replacement definition from ?tag=affiliate-20 to ?tag=affilliate-20&tag=affiliate-20 then it works in both cases, though it seems like there could be a better way.

I hope that all made sense. I'm not an expert with how AME works or the definitions, just seeking the optimal way to do Amazon affiliate codes;-)

Edit- Verified my definition is exactly the same as the one in the current download, except I'm using the "double" replacement tag above now. Prior to that it was identical except that I used my tag instead of yours in the replacement area.

Any word on EA Sports World.?

@DJ - I got it fixed.
The update method (reuploading files and re-importing/overwriting xml file) did not fix the problem.
I had to really uninstall Ame 2.5.6. After that, I reinstalled 2.5.6, removed the standard definitions and imported these here.
After that everything worked again with new posts. With old posts I have to use the edit and save button for the movie window to appear.

I presume I can only fix old post by editting and saving?

can you please tell me - does that AME parse inside forumlinks into titles links? or it was done by other hack? why I ask it? becouse when I update for new definitions all my forumlinks become just links instead of title-links?

Examples? Before update was:
vBulletin.org Forum

After update it turned into: http://vbulletin.org

Best I could tell "Local Links" used to be included but they aren't in the latest definition anymore. I don't know why, may have been causing errors. But if you had an old version that's probably what was doing it.

I haven't logged into Amazon in a while, since they closed all North Carolina accounts, but I'm wondering if the Link Checker is giving a false positive here. It seems to be looking at everything after the first question mark and checking it against your ID. For thumbnails, I tried a few things, but everything nerfs the ability to pull the correct image. I think I may be able to fix it for basic linking, but there's a possibility that you'll occasionally get the wrong URL.

This works on the basis of adding cookies to the user's computer, right? Is there a way to check for these and rather then validate against the Link Checker, validate against whether the cookie was added to a computer or not? Say, from a computer that hasn't visited an Amazon link with your ID.


Have a look at the AME requests forum. ;)


Unfortunately, yes. Posts that were using your temporary BBCode, however, can be changed in the AME CP's Tools menu. That was a very unusual error, but I could tell something was wrong when I cleaned out the defs and the product kept trying to convert it. It's like a definition got "stuck". Hope that corrects your issues.


I mentioned this during a previous update, but I had to drop ***Internal Linking for the time being, as it had a lot of problems. I'm developing a new set called vBulletin Linking, but that's still in the works and not completely bug free yet.