All three of the following links are to the second post in this topic. However, only the first two work. The third one worked until very recently, and we use it pretty extensively in our community to avoid cluttering wiki posts that reference several posts within the topic. That third link now just …

You can search your posts for URLs which match a regex. AFAIK you just need to specify anything in the title field, it doesn’t need to be the title but does have to pass something in.

You can specify anything for the title, yes. It’s not as simple as finding my posts though. It has become common practice in a portion of our community to remove the title entirely to avoid the verbose urls. So several users would have to fix all of their links. Why was this moved to support? Havin…

Because it’s something you need to fix due to unintended use, it was never a supportable thing. A bug is a feature of function that stopped working, which isn’t the case here. I’ve also updated the title to reflect what actually happened here, links aren’t created without a title, this has arisen b…

[image] Stephen: You can identify every broken link in one hit by looking through your database, your users don’t need to go back and fix them by hand I’m not an admin, so unfortunately I can’t do this. [image] Stephen: A bug is a feature of function that stopped working, which isn’t the…

That wouldn’t fix your problem though, right?

[image] seanblue: It has become common practice in a portion of our community to remove the title entirely to avoid the verbose urls. So several users would have to fix all of their links. Long term they need to fix their links, as what they were doing was basically an unsupported hack. As I…

[image] codinghorror: As I said, the topic ID only is indeed an officially supported form (to cover the “oops I forgot the title” case), but topic ID plus post ID is not. Oh, that’s interesting. What’s the reasoning for treating them differently? Is it not a case that people still forget the …

It’s a pretty nasty hack, because we are treating text as numeric. Essentially it is a “wow the user is really confused, I guess we’ll do the best we can” escape hatch. It is not meant to be a primary navigational method people should be relying on, especially once post IDs are also involved.

Is detection only happening at link click? Could we detect it when the post is baked and apply a class to any funky malformed links? [image] seanblue: I’m not an admin, so unfortunately I can’t do this. If this is such a big deal for your community why aren’t the admins here discussing it? T…

[image] seanblue: Oh, that’s interesting. What’s the reasoning for treating them differently? Is it not a case that people still forget the title but care about a specific post? It is interesting that the server side case handles it. There is a specific route for /t/:topic_id/:post_number. T…

Removing title from URL breaks links

Support

seanblue June 27, 2019, 6:59pm 17

I happened to notice it so I brought it up. It’s a very hands-off community, so I try to only get the admins involved when it’s really important. I’m very active in the community, particularly in the subgroup that would be most affected by this change.

Topic		Replies	Views
Incomplete topic titles beginning with a number can have odd behavior Support	6	1337	July 5, 2020
Clicking an internal link with slug only and no topic ID should create a history entry Bug	8	1436	July 22, 2021
Edit URL into a topic title after creation? Feature	17	3460	May 10, 2020
Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL Development seo	33	4231	October 13, 2024
`Topic#featured_link` containing more than just a valid URL Bug	5	833	December 4, 2017

Removing title from URL breaks links

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