A user mentioned this issue, and wondering what the best way to solve it is:
What's the best way to prevent permalinks from breaking as described above, and change all the permalinks when copied from the post numbers to the format /forum/posts/xxxx?
Thanks.
The permalink contain a page number. Imagine if the person A posts to the thread 20 times, then the person B will post, copy the permalink to his newest post and save it. The link will look like: "https://www.domain.com/forum/threads/somethread.x/page-y#post-z".
After a little while, a person A decides to delete all his 20 posts. The person's B post will then be on the page (y-1), so when someone opens a permalink, it will lead him to the next page from where the person's B post is now.
Here is what I did:
On the page https://www.domain.com/forum/threads/thread-title-thread.3582/page-767, the first post was by member Joe . I clicked on the post number to get a permalink, and here is what it looked like:
https://www.domain.com/forum/thread-title-thread.3582/page-767#post-1158303
I opened this link in a new incognito window of the browser to see if it works. It opened page 767 of the thread, then the page loaded, then it scrolled to Joe's post, as expected.
Then I opened the previous page (766) and deleted my old post. I reloaded the page 766 and saw Joes's post there, on the last position, as expected (because of the shift). Here comes the interesting part:
I copied new permalink to the Joe's post, it now looks like this and is accessable now:
https://www.domain.com/forum/thread-title-thread.3582/page-766#post-1158303
Then I tried to open an old link, it opened the page 767 as before, but after loading it didn't scroll anywhere obviously because it couldn't find Joe's post on this page anymore. The old permalink became broken.
I suggest using the following format for all permalinks:
https://www.domain.com/forum/posts/530335
What's the best way to prevent permalinks from breaking as described above, and change all the permalinks when copied from the post numbers to the format /forum/posts/xxxx?
Thanks.