[RFC] Human Readable URLs

[naim]

Needless to say: this only works with languages using latin characters - what about accents? Ogoneks? Tremas? Or characters from Katakana, Cyrillic, Greek, Hangul...? It should even give English users a little headache as there's no rule what happens to titles like this versus that:

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it's karma
its karma

Seems to work with non-Latin characters on Wikipedia.
Invalid uri characters would be replaced or removed.

[Senky]

Why not simply add topic_title_slug into DB table and instead of search, it would work in just the same way as topic_id (SQL query will not try to fetch data of specified ID, but slug instead). Slug would need to be unique, of course, but it is not a big deal to write function for generating slug after new topic has been submitted. And maybe also give an option for an admins to alter it - just like it is now in phpBB SEO MOD.

[brunoais]

I think that somewhat joining the last 4 posts is the best idea.
The clean title (same as there's a username_clean).
The title GET var may be used like Pony99CA stated. It's a dummy if there's enough info to get to the topic (having the topic_id or the post_id as GET variables) else it would redirect the user to a "search journey" to locate the topic with that title. If there's only one, then go to that one and ask no more questions, if there's, at least, 2 topics with that title, display a search result page with the multiple topics that match to that title.

Like @naim stated, we can convert characters like the "'" to entities or just replace them with underscores.

[Oleg]

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http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309&title=SEF_SEO_URLs

I don't expect SEO people to be happy with this.

[imkingdavid]

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http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2100309&title=SEF_SEO_URLs

I don't expect SEO people to be happy with this.

Perhaps it's not what they're going for, but even still when I see human-readable URLs on other boards, vBulletin for instance, both the topic/forum ID and the topic/forum title are still included in the URL. Take this URL from vBulletin.com's forum:

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https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/148-vBulletin-4-Suggestions

The first 3 numbers are the forum ID. The rest is a human-readable title of the forum.
Now look at this:

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https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/148

That goes to exactly the same place.
As does this:

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https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/148-BLAH

I don't see how that is really too much different than what Steve suggested, except that it uses a mod_rewrite-powered directory appearance rather than the original query string appearance. In either case, the readable part is meaningless.

EDIT: To note, providing only a string in the above URL without the ID does not result in the search behavior described by Steve. I think that having an "Oops, I couldn't find that (forum/topic), perhaps one of these is what you are looking for?" message with a short list of possible matches would be a nice improvement to the existing idea.

[Oleg]

Since the point of this is to do SEO, it's rather pointless to replace one SEO-poor implementation with another.

While having human-readable urls for humans is nice, in my opinion it is the SEO that makes these changes worthwhile.

[ecwpa]

I think imkingdavid's point is that if you implement that kind of URLs by default (not a mod or extension) it would be half of the job already done, then if you really want to have SEO URLs you only have to apply mod_rewrite as you like.

[Pony99CA]

Since the point of this is to do SEO, it's rather pointless to replace one SEO-poor implementation with another.

While having human-readable urls for humans is nice, in my opinion it is the SEO that makes these changes worthwhile.

Perhaps it's not ideal for SEO, but could you check the topic's Subject again.

And, as ecpwa said, we might have fought half the battle. Besides, I thought that the important part for SEO was getting the keywords in the URL, which this does.

Steve

[Oleg]

I think imkingdavid's point is that if you implement that kind of URLs by default (not a mod or extension) it would be half of the job already done, then if you really want to have SEO URLs you only have to apply mod_rewrite as you like.

How does mod_rewrite help with generating seo urls by phpbb?

[Oleg]

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/                                   Index
/forum-name-f12/                    Forum ID 12
/forum-name-f12/my-topic-t4/        Topic id 4
/forum-name-f12/post/               New topic in forum id 12'
/forum-name-f12/my-topic-t4/reply/  Reply in topic 4
/memberlist/                        Memberlist
/memberlist/leaders/                Leaders
/member/sam-m2/                     Member ID 2
/group/group-name-g4/               Group 4
/search/                            Just use REQUEST for the rest except for special case
/search/egosearch/                  Ego search

I do like all of these and I would support such an implementation.

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/ucp/{i}/                           Default GET params in the URL
/ucp/{i}/{mode}/                    
/mcp/{i}/                           Default GET params in the URL
/mcp/{i}/{mode}/
[/quote]
i should be changed to something textual, similarly to the other urls. This might require xcp modules to provide a slug.