I'll try to expand one time on all of the requests regarding SEO URL's.
I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion, just stating the 'state' as it is.
Also I'll try to keep it short and simple, without too many technical (code) terms.
First of all, it has nothing to do with actual SEO, as been stated over and over again.
So let's call them "Human readable URL's" for the sake of it.
Current state
As you can imagine, links are all over the board / internet. So simply changing them all to something else will break all current occurrences. Changing
viewtopic.php?t=123
to
topic/My-topic-title
will result in all previous links being broken. Now there are ways around that, but all of them are suboptimal.
Future state
phpBB uses a framework called
Symfony which uses so called
"routes". Most of the current extensions already use them. This makes URL's way more human readable. There are already some occurrences within the core aswell, for example the FAQ page:
help/faq and
help/bbcode. Instead of
help.php?mode=bbcode
they are turned into
help/bbcode
.
While extensions are already using these (and some of the core), most of it is not, but it is being worked on. Unfortunately it's a major operation and that will take time. However, once done, it will mean that all occurrences (for example
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2
) will change (for example
topic/2/My-first-topic
).
I know this might not be very soothing for the current situation, but that's the downfall of an ever evolving Open Source Software used by many.