Bug Still concerned, URL's have changed in 1.0.10

[Nimrod]

Morning,

After the disastrous update to 1.0.9 which resulted in /a/a for all our forum URL's I held off and downgraded back to 1.0.6 which was stable for us. Seeing 1.0.10 come out and fix the bug looked promising so I went and updated.

However we then found a lot of URL's still changed, especially for our forum URL's (which left a lot of dead links that ended up re-directing to forum root)::

http://digiex.net/downloads/download-center-2-0/
Becomes in 1.0.10:
http://digiex.net/downloads/download-center-2-0-a/

http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/
Becomes in 1.0.10:
http://digiex.net/guides-and-reviews/

Thread URL's themselves are changed to, however as they have thread ID in them they do redirect:
http://digiex.net/guides-reviews/console-guides/xbox-360-guides/3152-how-hack-250gb-320gb-sata-drive-work-xbox-360-xbox-360-slim.html
Becomes:
http://digiex.net/guides-and-reviews/console-guides/xbox-360-guides/3152-hack-250gb-320gb-500gb-sata-harddrive-work-xbox-360-xbox-360-slim.html
(Same for any other URL's which have there parent forum URL change)

Though saying that, we haven't changed our URL's for our most popular content for years (when we first moved from VBSEO to DBSEO, it kept the URL's perfect). Though now they are changing and it's something if possible I'd like to avoid :S

So two concerns really, dead forum links which leaves a lot of direct links to our site dead as well as internal links (though we can update our internal links, we can't update external links) and also Thread URL's changing which although 301, it's something we would like to avoid.

Not really sure what to do for now, can't keep staying on an older version in the long term

 

[Fillip H.]

Please see this post on the subject: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/f239...urls-loading-404-a-14446-post78145/#post78145

 

[Nimrod]

Please see this post on the subject: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/f239...urls-loading-404-a-14446-post78145/#post78145

I've read that and while I understand some people may have had an issue, I've had no problem in the 5 years I've been using VBSEO and now DBSEO with regards to this 'possible collision'. Infact now breaking links when they worked before has done more damage to those not affected.

I appreciate it sounds like a catch 22, but put it this way, by fixing a bug which a small number of users may have experienced due to the way they named forums, you basically forced everyone else to whom it was working fine with to now experience broken links. Not a problem for new forums, but for existing forums with lots of links directly to specific forums it's now caused a big issue. Perhaps the solution is a toggle option in the Control Panel 'Use Safe Method for Forum URL' which will include stop words to try and stop conflicts, and 'Use Classic Method' which will not and include a warning that it could clash if you name two forums very similarly with the only difference being a stopword (which to be honest thinking about it, sounds like an issue with 1% or less of forum owners..?)

Giving the option is better than breaking it for existing users for the sake of a few forum owners who need to name forums more uniquely or just use forum ID in their URL

Also don't have a clue why the '-a' got added to the Download Center Links, that's not even in the forum label!

Right now I'm stuck an old version for life :/

Please reconsider this issue...

 

[Fillip H.]

The issues fixed by the URL standardisation changes of v1.0.9/10 are not limited to stopwords. Since the very first version of DBSEO, there have been numerous reports of users experiencing conflicts between different rule sets.

For instance, let's say you have a forum format like so:
[forum_title]-[forum_id]/

And a thread format like so:
[thread_title]/

As far as DBSEO is concerned, the two URLs look like so:
<any character or symbol>-<a number>
<any character or symbol>

Now let's assume someone posts a thread title like so:
New Release: DBSEO version 2

The rewritten URL for that thread would, with the old system, be:
new-release-dbseo-2

Notice how this matches the <any character or symbol>-<a number> rule for forum URLs? In other words, if forum URLs are given a higher "priority" than thread URLs, the rewritten URL would be resolved as if it was a forum, and when visiting that thread you would see forum ID 2 (or an error message, if that forum ID does not exist or is inaccessible).

With the new system, the rewritten URL for that thread would be:
new-release-dbseo-2-a

Notice how it no longer matches the <any character or symbol>-<a number> rule for forum URLs? There is now a character after the number, which means it can't be a forum URL.
Before I discovered that this was the source of the problem, every week I was re-adjusting the priorities for URL formats in order to eliminate conflicts. In the Pro version, eliminating conflicts is incredibly difficult, as the ability to customise formats further increases the risk of conflicts.

The potential for conflict is not limited to forum URLs and thread URLs. Literally every format can conflict with literally any other format. The possibility for conflict is enormous.


I will implement a Legacy Forum URL option with explicit warnings that it should not be enabled unless strictly needed.

 

[Nimrod]

I will implement a Legacy Forum URL option with explicit warnings that it should not be enabled unless strictly needed.

Just wanted to say thank you, I upgraded to 1.0.11 and enabled the Legacy Forum URL option and everything seems to be working perfectly Checked our top 30 URL's from Google Analytics and the URL's are sound and not changed, and importantly the forum URL's no longer present errors and work as they did in VBSEO and also DBSEO 1.0.6 which we were still using.

Just checking, by providing a legacy URL option does this mean we may miss out on new features down the line, or is it totally unrelated?

Many thanks

 

[Fillip H.]

I can't say whether you would miss out of features later down the line, but I suspect not. It really only affects generation of forum URLs, I can't think of anything we would need to implement that would affect this.