Not a bug Redirect likes

[Kirby]

I'll give you navigating to the next post is bad, but navigating to the parent thread would be better than nothing.

Nope

If a linked content (like a post) is gone it should not be redirected anywhere as it is gone.

The user intentionally linked to that post, not to a thread; if that post is gone we don't know what the intent of the user would be now.
Though it would be fine to give a 404 and tell the user on that page that a thread still does exist and could be accessed.

If you bookmark/post/link to a post within a thread, you certainly would still want to get to the thread rather than a 404 with no clue what thread it was contained in, even though the thread still exists.

If I bookmark a post I am interested in that post, not necessarily in the thread.
If the post ist gone, the bookmark is useless - if I was interested in the thread I would have bookmarked that thread.
So: No, Id prefer a 404 if the post is gone instead of being uselessly redirected to a thread where I can't find the content I was looking for; that would just waste my precious time.

 

[rfc0001]

Except that's not what normally happens. What normally happens is you click on the post # link and copy the resulting URL:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/redirect-likes.168068/#post-1364888

which doesn't act as you describe it -it still works if the post doesn't exist, e.g.:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/redirect-likes.168068/#post-9999999

The only time you get the behavior you describe is if you right-click the post # and copy link, which i don't think most users would do. Granted most users wouldn't copy/paste/post links to posts so this is really an admin like myself who would do this. For me, I post links to posts (using the latter method which is more durable since it survives re-pagination) when there is a specific post I would like to highlight rather than post a link to the thread and have the users have to read through the entire thread to glean find what I was mentioning. I sometimes post links to posts externally, although this is confusing if you post them to Facebook for example since people don't know the context of what they are looking at. In either case, the entire thread discussion is relevant to the post since the post is in response to the original post (thread) regardless of whether the author of that specific post deletes their post - or a merge changes the posts # (ideally, the redirect of merged threads logic should apply to merged posts as well). It's an edge case, but ultimately having 404's from one thread to another thread within your forum break simply because of admin actions "(changing # of posts per page, merging threads, merging posts is bad when all these can be systematically avoided). It's just way to hard to predict or proactively search for these broken links, so either having XF do it for you (ideal), using an add-on (e.g. ST404 which is no longer supported), or monitoring 404s and deciding what to do with them is a good thing for SEO, user experience, etc.