Forum has link dupes

[LogicParrot]

This is bad.

Each thread has its link:

https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-2366.html

But, each post generates a different link with duplicate content, e.g.

https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-2366-post-24992.html

Duplicates are never, ever good for a website. The previous forum handled this very nicely by using the hash part of the url:
e.g. https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-2366.html#pid24992

[NiLSPACE]

I'm afraid I can't find an option to fix it though :/

[Mathias]

The problem is that the hash part doesn't work if the post is on a different page in a thread.

[LogicParrot]

The problem is that the hash part doesn't work if the post is on a different page in a thread.

Yes it does.

https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-2049-p...l#pid21775

[Mathias]

The problem is that the hash part doesn't work if the post is on a different page in a thread.

Yes it does.

https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-2049-p...l#pid21775

If you include page-x, yes, but for some reason MyBB decided to use post-x instead.

I'll see what I can do about this though.

[LogicParrot]

Why this is harmful:

• Confuses search engine crawlers. At best, we'll get double links in search results, at worst, some search engine will suspect we're doing something fishy and decrease our rank.
  
• Confuses a browser's cache, making it download the same content twice if visited from two different links.
  
• Confuses reverse proxies'
  
• Confuses humans.
  
• Messes up hyperlink colors.
  
• Messes up analytics.
  
• Makes mass regex replacements harder.
  
• Makes site scrapers/archivers download many redundant pages. (What if I want an offline backup of the forum so that I can read it in some remote area). We should probably fix this before the [url=https://web.archive.org/web/*/forum.cuberite.org[Internet Archive[/url] starts archiving this site.
  
• There are probably many more issues that I have not considered.
  

[LogicParrot]

It appears that myBB applies the canonical tag to the duplicate links. This means it will not confuse search engines. But this should still be fixed imo.

[LogicParrot]

@Mathias, I believe you have now brought back the old link format all across the site. e.g. https://forum.cuberite.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=5

Edit: Looks like someone is experimenting with this an trying different formats.

It's worth noting that the problem persists even with this format:
https://forum.cuberite.org/Thread-forum-...0#pid25600

[LogicParrot]

Umm, currently the site is completely messed up ^_^

[Mathias]

Ugh, I don't know how to fix this issue. :/