Discussion
I notice that in the last few weeks the links to topics have changed from simple short URLs with a number at the end so some huge thing with All+the+words+in+the+title as well as the numbers.
It's a bit annoying as you end up with a huge link for topics with big titles! Yet if you delete the words it still works! Any reason for this?
It's a bit annoying as you end up with a huge link for topics with big titles! Yet if you delete the words it still works! Any reason for this?
Search Engine Optimisation. Essentially search engines like "human readable" URLs and this is an attempt to give those to them. They aren't perfect (for example there shouldn't really be spaces, it ought really to be a hyphen instead of a space) but they are better than nothing (for search engines!)
In a perfect world, the servers would respond to various shorter URLs, e.g. instead of
gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=24&t=585540&nmt=Topic%20links
it would be good if it would respond to
gassing/585540
But gassing/Topic-Links (whilst theoretically perferable) would be impossible - for example which of the 1,304,084 "what car" threads would gassing/what-car point to?
In other words, this bit ?h=0&f=24 and this bit &nmt=Topic%20links are not specifically required to locate the topic in the database. IIRC h=0 makes the site display as PH, if you change h=0 to h={some other number} the site appears in different branding (but only using PH Classic skin it would seem). The f=24 I think is the forum ID - not entirely sure why it's in the URL because I would imagine the topic ID should be unique within the entire database.
There's a similar mechanism for looking up user profiles, e.g.
www.pistonheads.com/~NiceCupOfTea
But [michaelcaine] not a lot of people know that [/michaelcaine]
ETA - I know all this because I am a bit of a
and tend to 
with stuff 
In a perfect world, the servers would respond to various shorter URLs, e.g. instead of
gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=24&t=585540&nmt=Topic%20links
it would be good if it would respond to
gassing/585540
But gassing/Topic-Links (whilst theoretically perferable) would be impossible - for example which of the 1,304,084 "what car" threads would gassing/what-car point to?
In other words, this bit ?h=0&f=24 and this bit &nmt=Topic%20links are not specifically required to locate the topic in the database. IIRC h=0 makes the site display as PH, if you change h=0 to h={some other number} the site appears in different branding (but only using PH Classic skin it would seem). The f=24 I think is the forum ID - not entirely sure why it's in the URL because I would imagine the topic ID should be unique within the entire database.
There's a similar mechanism for looking up user profiles, e.g.
www.pistonheads.com/~NiceCupOfTea
But [michaelcaine] not a lot of people know that [/michaelcaine]
ETA - I know all this because I am a bit of a
and tend to with stuff Edited by miniman on Wednesday 17th September 21:33
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