"Friendly" URLs are back

Miles purchased a copy of vbSEO and uploaded it. I've fixed up the server and it seems to be working. Please post any bugs you find here.

For those who don't know what the heck vbSEO is, it turns

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/2-general-discussion/

into

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/2-general-discussion/

and so on.

Since we had vbSEO running previously, this means any old internal links using the "friendly" syntax are now working once more.

Sub-forums that have the same name won't work.

Any of the brackets for this years BSC will take you to last year's BSC.

Easy enough to fix.

Since it'll take some advanced tweaking to get vbSEO to discard category titles when using the entire forum path (i.e. ../forum-title/subforum-title), I've added in the forum IDs for now. That should fix forum view. Note that, in thread view, the forum ID will not be present.

I just noticed some dead links in the SAUS forum. Particularly the ones to individual brackets.

I was tweaking settings a while ago, they should work for you now.

Cool.

very nice! and it's nice to see there are a some new subforums in animespot

I tried spying on Face's (♪^___^♪) profile, but all the friendly URL gave me was this schmuck

Does that make me URL-unfriendly?

Originally Posted by CHz

My problem with the SEO is that there was a link redirection thing with links in private forums where the board software would give a blank referer, which means that I couldn't make links to music in My Stuff and Audio Requests that would only work when followed from GFF. I know the reason: letting gamingforce.org/forums/my-stuff/35711-itt-we-hotlink.html show up in referer logs would expose the hidden forums, but I don't support the SEO unless the redirection can be turned off.

Redirects.

Getting a User does not exist error for ♪^___^♪'s profile. (http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/members/♪^___^♪.html)

CHz: does it matter if the hidden forums require the user to be in a special usergroup to see? Or are they not protected like that?

Actually, if you look at ^-^ (Ness)'s profile, his links to Face's.

But it's a little inconvenient that I can't access Ness's profile when I need to. <_<

The proper link to my profile is this one: http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/members/-___-.html

I had to click my avatar in my journal to find it. All other links to my profile on the forum are broken.

As for ness's link, it does indeed show my profile instead. http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/members/-.html

No idea what's the proper link for his, if there's still one.

Ness's is: http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/members/%5E-%5E.html

Otherwise, if you just change that "-" to "^-^", it would link to his profile.

Originally Posted by janus zeal

CHz: does it matter if the hidden forums require the user to be in a special usergroup to see? Or are they not protected like that?

I'm not in a special usergroup, so I have no idea, but I expect it affects all forums which are not visible to people who aren't logged in.

blah can you fix the links on the number & permalink so when assholes who don't browse with 25 posts per page give me links, I'm not hunting for their stupid post I didn't really want to read anyway.

It should be possible since the 'originally posted by' links work properly, even when said assholes quote posts.

Blah, could you provide an option to turn friendly URLs on/off in the user cp?

I ask this because with the old system, copying and pasting download urls from Megaupload, Rapidshare, etc was much, much easier. Before I could copy links directly from the page and save them on notepad for later use. However, now I have to quote or click the links to obtain the full url address.

Eg. compare:
'MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service' INSTEAD OF 'http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TOMBSTONED'

The friendly urls are more time consuming and look like unsightly advertising. An option to turn them off would be nice.

good idea i sup– wait what the hell are you talking about

I have no idea what functionality you're describing, but it's most certainly not the "'friendly' URLs," which affects only GFF's page links. This system means that http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/showthread.php?t=24637 gets translated to http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/general-game-music-discussion/24637-song-week-week-103-voting-week-104-nominating.html, which does a much better job of indicating what's being linked to.

Can you link to a post showing this thing you're talking about? Because I've never seen that happen before. In fact, it didn't even happen to this post: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5CMNQHFJ

I think he means the trackback thing on links to external URLs. Try mousing over some external links and see what it says at the bottom of your browser window.