The discussion revolves around permalinks within Discourse. hgpot is trying to redirect topic 3405 to topic 5618 using permalinks but is unsuccessful. awesomerobot explains that it’s not possible to redirect a topic to another topic with a permalink and suggests alternatives, such as closing the original topic or archiving it.
codinghorror mentions that users often try to misuse permalinks in this way and suggests improving the UI to prevent this. Stephen questions the necessity of permalinks in the UI if not for migrating posts. sam points out that deleting the original topic and accessing the old link as a non-admin might make the permalink work. techAPJ has since improved the UI to include a description for permalinks.
I would like to redirect topic 3405 to topic 5618. So anyone linking to 3405 gets sent to topic 5618, instead.
I read up on Permalinks here:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/59727
https://meta.discourse.org/t/88918
I tried setting it up a few ways:
But none of these seem to make topic 3405 redirect to topic 5618.
I don’t believe it’s possible to redirect a topic to another topic with a permalink. You’d end up with a topic that exists but is inaccessible (because visiting it redirects you).
What you could do instead is close the original topic and make the last reply a link to the new one. Or if you want to hide the original topic entirely you could archive it.
We keep seeing users try to abuse permalinks in this manner, therefore our UI is broken. How can we make it more clear what this feature is for in the UI @techAPJ? Can we generate an error when someone tries to generate an internal permalink?
It may sound heavy-handed, but does permalinks need to exist in the UI if you aren’t migrating posts in?
Even if it’s used correctly there are situations where a permalink could be replicated within a post and won’t work, right?
Wait a second this should technically work if you delete topic 3405 and access old link as a non-admin.
Improved the UI to include description via:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/ed70595314f02e89c341287fac2fa56a81d2de05
