Hi, I’m trying to set up a 301 redirect from a forum thread to an external URL (on my blog) in /admin/customize/permalinks but it’s not doing anything.
I also tried deleting the original thread, but then it just says you need to log in to see it rather than redirecting to the external url.
I also tried renaming the original thread so the URL changed, but still no dice.
Any ideas if there’s a way to accomplish this? Alternatively, is there a way of setting a canonical link for that specific thread to the external URL instead?
I don’t think that you can use a permalink to override a topic. If you want a topic to link somewhere wise I think your only solution is to put a link to the other thing in the topic.
If anyone else comes looking to this topic in the future, the way I had to do it was to transfer the whole topic to a new one (to preserve the old content), then deleting the old topic.
I first tried this while the old topic was in a non-public category, but then it didn’t work (users would see a login screen instead of being redirected). But then I un-deleted it, moved it to a public category, and deleted it again—and it worked!
For me it was that I wanted to move content that started out as a topic on my forum last year into a blog post format (so I can easily update the date of the content for SEO reasons). The topic was doing well for certain terms, so I wanted to transfer that “SEO juice” to the updated blog post.
