[ABD] Human-Friendly URLs

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thecoalman
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by thecoalman »

luo-ning wrote: Tue Apr 05, 2022 6:25 pm Difficult for me to test rn as unfortunately, we're having some unrelated SEO issues at the moment — Google simply doesn't seem to be trawling the vast majority of the forum. But I'm pretty sure it'd continue to use the canonical URL in search results, as that's what canonical URLs are for.


What I think Google expects is that the dominant link structure used in the HTML should match the canonical. phpBB already has issues with redundant links and you are piling more on. ;) If you don't have Google search console account get one and see what if anything is causing problems.

While I would love to see friendly URL's added to the core the warning I give about any modifications like this that significantly change URL's structures is that there is always a risk it will go unsupported in the future or conflict with future core changes.
P_I wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 8:54 pm If human's want friendly and readable URLs then they should just post them. It is easily done.
The idea is to make things easy for users. Copy and paste from the address bar, read it in the address bar, read it on mouseover. With that said I would suggest there is much better approach to this at least for the anchor text for internal URL's in posts.

viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1053375

That of course does not work with current version of phpBB.
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P_I
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by P_I »

thecoalman wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:28 am The idea is to make things easy for users. Copy and paste from the address bar,
Or use a browser extension to facilitate the cut and paste and make the link human readable. I rarely post naked links cut and pasted from the address bar. That's how humans can format URLs to be friendly to other humans.

Back to the issue of phpBB generated URLs with "technical parameters" that are not considered human-friendly, that's not a huge issue for me but I understand other consider it problematic and an SEO "concern". I can see there is merit in the approach provided by this extension and board admins who are concerned about how pretty their URLs look might find this one helpful. Thumbs up to the extension developer.
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luo-ning
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by luo-ning »

danieltj wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 8:48 pm Is there any scope to add ‘pretty URLs’ at all?
If you mean removal of viewtopic.php etc. and the slug being a path segment rather than query param, then not at this point. I believe https://github.com/phpbb-seo/usu does that, though I haven't tried it. Any solution will still need to contain the topic ID within the slug, as otherwise slugs can't be guaranteed to be unique.
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luo-ning
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by luo-ning »

thecoalman wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:28 am What I think Google expects is that the dominant link structure used in the HTML should match the canonical.
D'you have any evidence for this? https://developers.google.com/search/do ... icate-urls simply mentions "There are valid reasons why your site might have different URLs that point to the same page" and doesn't mention anything about penalties for using them.
thecoalman wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:28 am If you don't have Google search console account get one and see what if anything is causing problems.
Yes, that's something on the site owner's to-do list (I'm not the site owner, just another admin).
thecoalman wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:28 am While I would love to see friendly URL's added to the core the warning I give about any modifications like this that significantly change URL's structures is that there is always a risk it will go unsupported in the future or conflict with future core changes.
I think that's less likely with this extension as it doesn't change the underlying format of the URLs at all, just takes advantage of a PHP "blind-spot" (parsing strings to integers ignores any non-integer-like part).

It's maybe not quite zero-risk, but it's as close to zero-risk as a URL-rewriting extension could reasonably get. And everything remains backward-compatible if you uninstall it later.
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thecoalman
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by thecoalman »

luo-ning wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 2:12 am D'you have any evidence for this? https://developers.google.com/search/do ... icate-urls simply mentions "There are valid reasons why your site might have different URLs that point to the same page" and doesn't mention anything about penalties for using them.
Check what links are indexed for viewtopic.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mysql+site%3Aphpbb.com

Google is indexing the main URL structure instead of the canonical URL. Perhaps they only indexd it once and never indexed the cancal URL but what tver the case most viewtopic results have the f parameter. Whether this is an issue with your extension I don't know, I'm just pointing it out. If you have just installed this and are now have issue with indexing it's something to investigate.
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luo-ning
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by luo-ning »

Nah the indexing issue has been going on since the forum's inception. In fact, it's slightly improved recently, but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the extension, and none of the indexed URLs have slugs, as expected.

I do notice the indexed links don't seem to be the canonical URLs at all, though (both on phpBB Community, which doesn't use the extension, and our forum, which does)... Maybe this is an issue with phpBB's implementation of the canonical meta tag? Will investigate further.
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by thecoalman »

luo-ning wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 11:50 am Maybe this is an issue with phpBB's implementation of the canonical meta tag?
The anchor links have f parameter, the canonical URL does not. While it's technically not an issue it certainly doesn't make sense that a canonical URL exists no where in anchor tags.

Note this was recently changed and no longer the case with newest release.
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by hicmed »

Hi thanks for this extension I'm using in my broad without problem

I just want to disable this feature
Image
Can u tell me how
I would use my old one
Thank you
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luo-ning
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by luo-ning »

hicmed wrote: Tue Apr 19, 2022 4:40 pm I just want to disable this feature
It's not currently configurable. Why do you want to disable it?
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by hicmed »

Because I use extension who show the title of the topic in place of the link but this feature mess it up 🙂

I hope you can make it configurable

Thank you
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luo-ning
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by luo-ning »

hicmed wrote: Wed Apr 20, 2022 2:29 am Because I use extension who show the title of the topic in place of the link but this feature mess it up 🙂

I hope you can make it configurable

Thank you
Upgrade to 0.1.14-beta, then go to ACP > Extensions > Human-Friendly URLs > Settings > set "Intelligently render Unicode link text in posts" to "No".
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by hicmed »

very nice thank you
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max-ima
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by max-ima »

Tested on 3.3.7 and works. Thanks
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Mixlight - eStriKe
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by Mixlight - eStriKe »

Tested on 3.3.8 so far works well
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Re: [3.3][BETA] Human-Friendly URLs

Post by [Dimetrodon] »

Seems to be working on phpBB 3.3.10 as I have enabled it on my site.
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