Links to old threads no longer work

[Chumango]

In the past I have seen (and have used) links to threads. Now those links do not work. They just take you to the page that says the forum is down for maintenance, the one that showed up when the forum changed to the new software.

[The Deacon]

In the past I have seen (and have used) links to threads. Now those links do not work. They just take you to the page that says the forum is down for maintenance, the one that showed up when the forum changed to the new software.

I'm fairly certain that cannot be fixed. While the thread still exist, the URL for page where it is located has changed, so the link to the old URL will no longer work. If the post with the dead link is yours, you can find the thread it referenced, edit your post, and replace the old URL with the new one, but there's no way that can be fixed globally by Kristi. The best she could do would probably be to change the redirect from the "forum down" page to a "page not found" page.

[TazKristi]

Deacon is correct. Unfortunately, we can't globally fix those. The old forum still resides at the original url and it will for awhile as a safety net of sorts. The thread ID however remains the same so with some minor revisions to the link it should be relatively easy to fix the link. See below for a few examples of the links to the same threads in the old and new forum. I know this isn't ideal, but staying in vBulletin wasn't an option.

Old forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forums/showthread.php?64718-Spyderco-2014-Lists-Delivered-Coming-Soon-amp-Later
New forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forumII/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=64718

Old forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forums/showthread.php?52694-Kindness-of-Your-Hearts
New forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forumII/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52694

Old forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forums/showthread.php?60206-I-ll-see-your-Spyderco-and-raise-you-another!
New forum - http://www.spyderco.com/forumII/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=60206

[Matus]

I noticed that too. However - I am wondering how ling it will take until we can search the new forum with google (that is always the way I search fora unless they use google directly) - right now google delivers no results at all.

[TazKristi]

I noticed that too. However - I am wondering how ling it will take until we can search the new forum with google (that is always the way I search fora unless they use google directly) - right now google delivers no results at all.

Matus,
Unfortunately, that's not something we can control and I can't really answer that for you. It's in Google's hands (and other search engines of course too).

[williaty]

I can't remember the correct term for this because it's been probably a decade since I've done it, but there's a way to make the web server go "Oh, you requested a URL off the old forum, I can redirect that to a working URL by just changing this bit" and it is totally transparent to the user.

[TazKristi]

I can't remember the correct term for this because it's been probably a decade since I've done it, but there's a way to make the web server go "Oh, you requested a URL off the old forum, I can redirect that to a working URL by just changing this bit" and it is totally transparent to the user.

Williaty,
Yes, we did that for the original links on our site for the forum. But the links in question here are all over the forum, through over 15 years of posts and they are posted by numerous people. We have no efficient way of scanning every post ever made and discerning which links need to be redirected and then redirect each individual link. Unfortunately, that's just not possible.

Thanks for understanding.

Kristi

[williaty]

I can't remember the correct term for this because it's been probably a decade since I've done it, but there's a way to make the web server go "Oh, you requested a URL off the old forum, I can redirect that to a working URL by just changing this bit" and it is totally transparent to the user.

Williaty,
Yes, we did that for the original links on our site for the forum. But the links in question here are all over the forum, through over 15 years of posts and they are posted by numerous people. We have no efficient way of scanning every post ever made and discerning which links need to be redirected and then redirect each individual link. Unfortunately, that's just not possible.

Thanks for understanding.

Kristi

No, there's a more automated way than that, I really wish I could remember the name of the function. It uses regular expressions to match the portion of the URL that belong to the old forum software and re-write them on the fly to the new forum. So you don't have to re-do it statically for every link you need to change, a single rule in the server causes every request for an outdated URL to be re-aimed at a valid URL without you having to set each one up by hand. It's something that happens at request time dynamically. In other words, you configure it to recognize /path/to/old/forum/t=12345 as an old-style URL. When a browser makes a request for that URL, the server knows to change that on the fly to /path/to/new/forum/t=12345 without anyone having to do anything. It's part of the rewriting/remapping/redirection functionality available in mod_rewrite for Apache.

Regardless, hopefully Google will quickly catch on that the forum's URL structure has changed. It'd just be nice to have the whatever-it-is-who's-name-I-can't-remember active in the meantime.

[TazKristi]

I'll have our webmaster take a look and see what we can do. I can't make any promises, but we can try.

[mattman]

I tried editing the URL with an old thread id#, and was unsuccessful... Does the above method still apply to the new NEW forum?

Here is the old link...

http://spyderco.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40418" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mattman]

Well... I tried again, and it worked.

I might have had a unique URL source on the first earlier attempts, with a time stamp or something, Idk... I know nothing about http, other than things I've figured out on my own...