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cx16forum / forum-issues

Bugs, Issues, and requests for the Commander X16 Community Forums
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URL beauty standards #5

Closed Frosty-J closed 1 year ago

Frosty-J commented 1 year ago

Hey Tom, do you happen to know what the current state of SEO/human-friendly URL plugins is with phpBB? Seeing as the closest I've administrated is MyBB (wouldn't recommend - I had to hack mobile support into the theme) and that only really has "BB" in common, I'm really out of the loop with what's what. I found usu but it appears to no longer be in development.

E.g. on the current forums we have addresses like index.php?/topic/5083-the-forum-is-moving/ which reveal at a glance what the thread is about. Compare this with viewtopic.php?t=5083 on the new forums and you'd have no idea. Even if the link is posted on social media, you'd probably still have no idea, as the new forums lack OpenGraph metadata used by Discord, Twitter etc. to generate a title/description/thumbnail preview. That's not to say the original is perfect - I find the way Discourse and Flarum structure URLs (t/the-forum-is-moving/5083 and d/5083-the-forum-is-moving) to be cleaner than exposing PHP.

If there's nothing that can be practically done, it's not the end of the world as it's not like ugly URLs ever stopped YouTube, for example, from being a popular website.

CX16Community commented 1 year ago

AFAIK this is not a feature of phpBB, nor do I plan to add it. I prefer numeric entries in URLs, since it makes downloading and scraping messages simpler.

Frosty-J commented 1 year ago

If you ever consider this in future, bear in mind the text part is nearly always optional with platforms that include an ID in the address, leaving scraping unaffected. Invision is a bit weird but even with it you can make up your own title and it'll redirect (e.g. index.php?/topic/5094-a -> index.php?/topic/5094-the-forum-is-currently-read-only/).