[RFC] Human Readable URLs

[callumacrae]

Could people please stop calling them "SEO URLs" without providing evidence that they help with SEO?

[Ger]

Oh well, it does something for SEO, since somekind of keyword is in the URL. However, it's effect is minimal. Relevant content, sitemaps, etc. do far more.

Anyway: the RFC is titled Human readable URLs. And they do have the advantage that people understand what's behind the link and therefore it could generate more clickthroughs. It is more user-friendly anyhow. A simple implementation like

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http://www.example.com/f-##/t-##-{title}

should suffice.

[Oleg]

A simple implementation like

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http://www.example.com/f-##/t-##-{title}

should suffice.

This puts keywords 5 positions off the beginning of the url, unlike what was proposed in the first post.

[Senky]

Why not simply make "title" GET key available to be used, make it easier for MOD authors to access it, so that it can be used by .htaccess to make nice URLs, so that users can see what topic is about even when hovering over the link. I think this is the propose of this RFC...

I think it can be simply achieved by adding topic_title_slug or topic_title_clean or whatever to DB and add "title" GET key available for searching the topics. Now, we can see the topic either by specifying topic_id ("t" GET key) or post_id ("p" GET key). We can simply add "title" GET key and nothing more. new column in DB and few lines in viewtopic.php.

Or is this about something more complex?

[AmigoJack]

new column in DB and few lines in viewtopic.php

I think most coders think and act like that. But what about performance? Looking up a text means more stress to the DBMS than looking up an integer. Also those mod_rewrite solutions suffer from Apache eating more CPU cycles. I'd really like to see how it would impact a big board like the phpBB community one.

[drathbun]

Who says the extra part of the URL has to be valid to retrieve content? Why can't it be simply decorative? If the topic or post ID value is still a part of the web address, then just ignore the text while doing the database queries. The extra text provides more information to a user, so they can get an idea of what the link is going to take them to.

For example, this:

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http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=40965&start=60

Is not human readable at all, but it serves the purpose to link to this page of this topic.

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http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=40965&start=60/human-readable-urls/

That serves the same purpose but with additional text so a human has some idea what the topic / link is about.

Amazon and eBay both use this strategy. For example, here is an Amazon.com URL (US site) for the Hunger Games Blu-ray:

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http://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Games-2-Disc-Blu-ray-Digital/dp/B0084IG7KC/ref=sr_tr_sr_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339429639&sr=8-1

However, this link goes to the exact same page without the extra text:

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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0084IG7KC/

Both links are valid. You can bet that the ASIN B0084IG7KC is the only part that's used to look up the page contents, the rest of the text is descriptive only.

[Senky]

new column in DB and few lines in viewtopic.php

I think most coders think and act like that. But what about performance? Looking up a text means more stress to the DBMS than looking up an integer. Also those mod_rewrite solutions suffer from Apache eating more CPU cycles. I'd really like to see how it would impact a big board like the phpBB community one.

This was just one possibility. Another one is like what imkingdavid and drathbun suggested - to have topic title just decorative and the only functional parts will be topic_id and post_id. URLs can look like: viewtopic.php?t=xx&title=topic-title; while mod_rewrite will only consider topic_id...

[Ger]

@Oleg: we can just put it on front, doesn't really matter. See also drathbuns post.

[Oleg]

I support viewtopic.php?p=240415#p240415, half-solutions I'd rather not do.

[brunoais]

I support viewtopic.php?p=240415#p240415, half-solutions I'd rather not do.

The problem with that is that it requires that the server supports mod_rewrite.
That does not mean that it's not testable, though.
I think we should not make such thing mandatory (if we add to phpBB) but we should make that available and we could test it on installation time. Quite easy to test