question on bookmars and links

IzFazt · Joined: 11 Feb 2008 Posts: 6

for more thn a month I had some help installing advnced seo, the only mod I id not insal myself. I hve a question on bookmarks. Suppose my forum html is a-b-c-f1.html and i change the name of the forum to xyz. The html does then become x-y-z.html? Or not? What happens to links and bookmarks on the old name, do they still work?

Sorry if it is a stupid question but I did not install this myself and don't quit understand it yet.

dcz

It's a good question.

As explained in the acp, url will mostly be HTTP 301 redirected thanks to the zero duplicate mod, but there are some exceptions depending on your setting.

Redirection will always occur for url using a delimiter as long as they keep the same extension (.html or /) while they change.
old-topic-title-txx.html, forum-title-fyy/old-topic-title-txx.html and even forum-url/old-topic-title-txx.html (topic url with virtual folder trick and forum id removing) will always be properly redirected if you edit titles to :

new-topic-title-txx.html, forum-title-fyy/new-topic-title-txx.html or forum-url/new-topic-title-txx.html depending on your settings.

This means that old url (that could have been bookmarked or posted in a message) will still work, but will be redirected, and only the new one will be used to build urls in the forum.

The exceptions stand mostly for forum urls without IDs, if you have a forum named "my super forum talking about marketing", by default, it's url will be my-super-forum-talking-about-marketing-fxx.html, now if you decide, after some time to set up a nicer url without id, such as marketing.html or marketing/, the old url will properly be redirected, but if you change marketing/ to let's say marketing-forum/, marketing/ will be a 404.

So in such case you'll need to implement custom redirections. The good thing is that forum urls should just never change, since only the admins can set them up, there is no moderation involved, the only matter is to understand that the choice made is meant to be final for forum urls, even if we can still redirect them on a per case basis.

Other case where some work must be done to allow proper redirection is when you would change extension, or url rewriting type for profile urls, or static parts, like messagexx.html instead of postxx.html. Again, these are settings that should be set up once and for all at the very beginning, but it's still possible to implement custom redirections for such cases, and it's easier than for the forum without id since we can use a single rewriterules for all profiles (for example) instead of one per forum to redirect.

++