How do i remove the -t in my first topic

[linhhuchong]

I want to add a sticky topic with the like topic-title
The rewrite function automatically change to ->topic-title-t3
How do i remove this suffix "t3" in my sticky topic?

[HB]

You can't. The number after the -t is the topic number. How would viewtopic.php know what topic to display if this wasn't part of the URL?

[scrybbler]

You can't. The number after the -t is the topic number. How would viewtopic.php know what topic to display if this wasn't part of the URL?

I think it could be done. dcz has said it can be done. It would have an index that matches the unique thread names with thread numbers. phpBB SEO is already doing the same thing with forum names.

I definitely understand why this isn't an option -- very little SEO gain. I expect that it might slow down a big board too. You'd also need to do a uniqueness check anytime a user creates a new topic.

That said, if this feature existed, I'd run it in a heartbeat.

[HB]

I definitely understand why this isn't an option -- very little SEO gain. I expect that it might slow down a big board too. You'd also need to do a uniqueness check anytime a user creates a new topic.

I agree those are all good reasons it wasn't written that way. On the other hand, not all news sites use a lookup key these days, so clearly it can be done. My guess is that the performance hit would be prohibitive for many (small server) phpBB installations. If you do make the necessary code changes, please share them.

[Stephen26]

I honestly wouldn't recommend doing that. I don't believe it helps you (significantly) from a SEO perspective and it might have drawbacks.

[scrybbler]

Wish I could, but Pascal is my best programming language

Again, I understand why this doesn't exist, but at the same time I do have some curiosity about whether it would work. phpBB SEO is an amazing tool, and the primary reason I've installed phpBB. But from a completist point of view, this feature is the last thing that is lacking before phpBB SEO gives you total control. Everybody loves total control.

In my personal case, we're transitioning from bbpress, which DOES create totally clean SEO URLs. (It's also underfeatured, dependent on Wordpress, and possibly dying on the vine.) So removing the -txx would be a big win for us because we could move the board to phpbb without doing any redirects. Ah well.

As servers get faster, I suspect the performance consideration will fall away. But until then I expect there are much bigger fish to fry.

Thanks for the feedback...!

I definitely understand why this isn't an option -- very little SEO gain. I expect that it might slow down a big board too. You'd also need to do a uniqueness check anytime a user creates a new topic.

I agree those are all good reasons it wasn't written that way. On the other hand, not all news sites use a lookup key these days, so clearly it can be done. My guess is that the performance hit would be prohibitive for many (small server) phpBB installations. If you do make the necessary code changes, please share them.

[HB]

I don't believe it helps you (significantly) from a SEO perspective and it might have drawbacks.

I'm not convinced search engines care one whit about the presence of lookup keys like -t9999 in the URL. Ebay and Amazon, to name only two sites, have immense server capacity and yet have apparently decided embedded lookup keys in their item URLs are worth keeping. Good enough proof for me.

So removing the -txx would be a big win for us because we could move the board to phpbb without doing any redirects. Ah well.

phpBB-SEO already handles "clean" URLs for member profiles by doing an under-the-covers lookup. This works well because user names are guaranteed unique and servers aren't hammered by users browsing each others' profiles as would be the case for "clean" topic lookups. If you want to map your old (clean) URLs to phpBB-SEO based topics, you could follow the similar strategy. That is, detect a not found in .htaccess and forward it to viewtopic.php as a lookup by topic subject. If no match is found, return 404, otherwise use the topic ID and continue.

Of course this assumes you're willing to learn PHP programming. Given that Pascal is only used in academia, I think it's time well spent.