Will I be able to remove the period/full stop/dot and number, eg.(.3405) from SEO URL's?

L

lawfil

New member
Hello,

I'm very interested in buying XenForo.

I have a question:

Will I be able to remove the period/full stop/dot and number, eg.(.3405) from SEO URL's?

The current URL's with the dot and number after it don't go well with a non-forum/non-technically minded community, because people expect profiles to just contain the username (without a full stop and number) and thread titles to just contain the title.

Is this possible to achieve?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
People generally don't care. I run several big boards on XF, and prior to that VB. I don't recall ever hearing a user complain about this, and one of the sites had 500,000 registered users.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It would be possible with custom development, but it would require some heavy customization since (most likely) everything is built around integer IDs. And it would break on probably every update, so constant maintenance would be required.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ftsservice said:
People generally don't care. I run several big boards on XF, and prior to that VB. I don't recall ever hearing a user complain about this, and one of the sites had 500,000 registered users.
Click to expand...
Correct, people who've grown up with forums won't care (like me). People who have not grown up with forums (the younger generation) will whinge and whine and complain about having to remember numbers instead of a simple username.
yoloswaggerino said:
It would be possible with custom development, but it would require some heavy customization since (most likely) everything is built around integer IDs. And it would break on probably every update, so constant maintenance would be required.
Click to expand...
As long as it works, my users will like it. I just hope somebody will be able to do this for me for a few hundred dollars, and that it is technically possible to make it work.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
The number is the required part, the topic title text is whats optional. The url to a topic is actually <url>/threads/123456 and I don‘t see how you could make it the topic title cause that may or may not be unique. I don‘t think a mod for this is possible without risking collisions (topic titles not being unique).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
lawfil said:
As long as it works, my users will like it. I just hope somebody will be able to do this for me for a few hundred dollars, and that it is technically possible to make it work.
Click to expand...
It is technically possible, but as I said, it's pretty much rewriting core parts as a whole. A one-time job wouldn't be enough.
TimFL said:
The url to a topic is actually <url>/threads/123456 and I don‘t see how you could make it the topic title cause that may or may not be unique.
Click to expand...
There are techniques for that. One of them is, with duplicate thread titles, show a landing page where the user can choose his desired thread from.
The other one is to make titles case and accent sensitive.
And last but not least, you could automatically add an auto-increment number to titles, like "Will I be able to remove the period/full stop/dot and number, eg.(.3405) from SEO URL's? (2)" which would translate to "will-i-be-able-to-remove-the-period-full-stop-dot-and-number-eg-3405-from-seo-urls-2".
Of course, you could always combine all of them. I'm pretty sure there are other possibilities aswell.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
lawfil said:
Correct, people who've grown up with forums won't care (like me). People who have not grown up with forums (the younger generation) will whinge and whine and complain about having to remember numbers instead of a simple username.

As long as it works, my users will like it. I just hope somebody will be able to do this for me for a few hundred dollars, and that it is technically possible to make it work.
Click to expand...

Why on Earth would a user need to remember the numbers? To a username? You start typing the username in search and when it pops up, done. Who the hell is manually writing out URLs to find a user?

As far as the name changing to a number in tags. Sucks a little but overall here is the thing. Username changes carry over. The numbers plain and simple are a part of SEO. Reducing dead links is important. You don't want someone clicking on a search result and getting a 404. Without the numbers a thread rename or a username change breaks things.

Also duplicate thread titles which will eventually happen, without numbers and without significant effort to mitigate will be an issue. It just plain doesn't make sense. It can be done. But it's got its flaws.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Back
Top Bottom