Not a bug Broken links after merging threads

[mono]

Affected version

1.5.17

I had an issue several months ago that moderators merged three old large threads into one which I hadn't noticed. The result was one big thread with broken links and totally mixed up posts. I tried to write redirects from existing links to new ones, but the main issue that nginx rewrite rules don't understand the "#"character inside these links or it maybe a browser related thing. Most of them look like this: threads/thread-title.1234/page-115#post-310043.
I have two questions regarding this:

1. Is there any known solution to get working redirects for type of links I mentioned?
2. If it was the bug (broken links) could you suggest any way to understand what happened?

 

[Mike]

Existing links not working is somewhat expected on the whole, though it depends on exactly how the links look. If they are linking to the old thread, a redirect would need to exist for XF to direct people to the new thread; otherwise, specific redirects would need to be setup outside of XF. The hash not being accessible to the server is standard browser behavior -- it's not sent to the server. To do post-specific redirects, you would need to do work on the client side to catch the links (or catch when someone lands on it) and take the necessary action.

Note that XF2 takes a different approach with post-specific links which makes them less susceptible to page changes or being moved to a different thread, though it depends on exactly how the link is copied (as eventually, you will end up on a page of a particular thread and that will have a very similar URL to your example).