Invalid URL's after an upgrade and a forced move...

[Charles Parker]

I sent in a support ticket but thought I might get an answer here as well or perhaps some solid advice.
We had our vbulletin forum up and running for years...and I decided we needed to upgrade so we bought the vbulletin V5 connect. As it turns out we needed to upgrade our hosting account because of the Mysql version offered by godaddy on our old hosting account...sooo we bought a new Cpanel account and I quickly added our domain to it and then brought our database over and our files, then I began the upgrade. Things took FOREVER but I eventually got the upgrade done and ALL of our data, blogs, attachments, etc are in tact and because we have a tone of historical information on our association - this was truly pretty cool on vbulletins part! We UPGRADED TO A NEW SERVER, A NEW DATABASE AND LOST NOTHING during the upgrade! KUDOS for sure.
NOW, we have an issue with our existing blogs and the URL's. It seems if you find our members blogs in a google search you will come up with (for example)

http://www.nwcoa.info/nwcoabb/entry.php?172-Raccoon-Removal-Dayton-Ohio

This results in an Invalid URL however if you knock out the folder "nwcoabb" you will get the NEW url to the blog
This link is the current link to the upgraded and moved blog...

http://www.nwcoa.info/entry.php?172-Raccoon-Removal-Dayton-Ohio

Does anyone have any advice on how I can fix this URL issue?
I already tried to create the nwcoabb folder and drop the installation in there - that does not solve it.

Thoughts???

[Mark.B]

Has your forum ever actually run in a folder called nwcoabb?

[Charles Parker]

Yes it has! That's why we have this issue AND why I thought by simply running it in a folder called nwcoabb I could easily resolve this.
My situation is VERY similar to this post on stack overview...http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...using-htaccess
I think htaccess is the way to go and I tried about every variation listed there but nothing seemed to alter the URL to drop the "folder" nwcoabb from it and correctly redirect the visitor like I want it to.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. The support I got from a vbulletin support ticket was to edit the htaccess file but again I tried and of course I did not succeed. Having no knowledge of what all the code variables are or what the #$/^ mean to vbulletin I am getting nowhere FAST!
Thanks again for any help - I am certain this can be fixed, but I do not know exactly how.

[Wayne Luke]

Since you moved it out of the folder, you would need to use .htaccess to redirect /nwcoabb/* to /*.

What did you put in the .htaccess file? You would need a line like this:
RewriteRule ^nmcoabb/(.*)$ /$1 [L,NC,R=302,NE]

This should appear before this line:
# Main Redirect

[Charles Parker]

Wayne,
THANKYOU. I hope this helps someone else out in the future. That was exactly what I and my users needed to happen, and I really appreciate the time you took to help me solve that.
Of course it needed a small tweak as the folder was nwcoabb and not nmcoabb - but hey you nailed it!
I was actually so very close, with the advice from stack overflow, and frankly I do not know all of the variations I tried - but again your advice was solid and works perfectly.

Thanks again!

Charles