RMcGirr83 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 8:52 am
Extensions don't make any changes to any core phpBB files, at least they aren't supposed to.
Let me clarify, your board may work fine but the old internal links that have been posted and external links on other sites won't. Let's suppose phpBB decides to support URL rewriting in a future release, if that feature doesn't support the URL structure you have already implemented you are going to have a problem because it's unlikely anyone is going to support a third party URL rewriting extension.
You can fix URL's that have been posted internally but you can't fix them externally. From both a SEO perspective and user experience perspective you will have to redirect the old URL's to the new ones if you do not have the means to serve them as they originally were.
Another issue is if an upgrade to phpBB breaks the extension, if it's an important security update to phpBB this isn't something you can just deactivate and wait around for the author to update it.
While on the topic I would suggest that if phpBB does support URL rewriting in a future release they provide the means to customize the structure of the URL's .
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
Attributed - Thomas Edison