There were two recent discussions around issues related to topic links redirecting when the topic title in the URL didn’t completely match the expected value ([1], [2]). Then when I was on Amazon I realized that they also allow for fuzzy titles, but they don’t redirect. For example, the following pages all display the same content, without doing a redirect.
- Official title: https://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-VII-Remake-PlayStation-Deluxe/dp/B07SJ2P1XC/
- Made-up title: https://www.amazon.com/random-text/dp/B07SJ2P1XC
- No title: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SJ2P1XC
This got me wondering why Discourse does redirects at all, since based on the two issues mentioned above it seems like not doing redirects could avoid some headaches. Is there a reason (technical or otherwise) that the non-matching URLs are handled via redirects instead of serving the same content regardless of the title in the URL?