[@synaptic Participant 12 years, 5 months ago]

@tieptoep thanks but I think you’re totally misunderstanding what I and others are suggesting as a solution. Please stay with me and I’ll explain why.

To clarify:

Existing permalinks structure for forum:

mydomain.com/forums/forum/forum-name/

and if a sub-forum is created, it would be this:

mydomain.com/forums/forum/”forum-name”/”sub-forum-name”

Now, compare this to the proper way to do the permalinks:

mydomain.com/forums/”forum-name”

and if a sub-forum is created:

mydomain.com/forums/”forum-name”/”sub-forum-name”

And for each thread permalink, this is the way it is right now:

mydomain.com/forums/topic/”thread-permalink-slug”

But this puts every single forum outside the universe of their respective forum. That is, every thread exists, as a permalink, without any relevance to the forum that contains it! This is both intuitively wrong and just plain wrong for many many reasons. Threads are link “things” which belong in “boxes” (forums), which then may or may not belong in “bigger boxes” (main forums, if there are sub-forums created).

Instead, this is the proper way to do thread permalinks:

mydomain.com/forums/”forum-name”/”thread-permalink-slug”

and if the thread is created inside a sub-forum:

mydomain.com/forums/”forum-name”/”sub-forum”/”thread-permalink-slug”

Of course, the slug forums used above can be changed to “discussions” or any other word. But the main point I’m trying to make here is the relative structure of threads and forums to each other, as well as the excision of the unnecessary …/forums/forum/… double.

This is wrong, again, for many reasons. Among them, it is inelegant, unnecessary, and it introduces a very deep branch unnecessarily which makes for poor SEO.

So let’s say you have a forum about social media, under what I and others here are proposing, you would have this permalink structure:

mydomain.com/forums/social-media/

and let’s say you had sub-forums for facebook, twitter and linkedin:

mydomain.com/forums/social-media/facebook

mydomain.com/forums/social-media/twitter

mydomain.com/forums/social-media/linkedin

That makes perfect sense, right? But under the current permalinks structure, it currently is:

mydomain.com/forums/forum/social-media/

mydomain.com/forums/forum/social-media/facebook

mydomain.com/forums/forum/social-media/twitter

mydomain.com/forums/forum/social-media/linkedin

See the difference? Now that’s nothing. Wait. Let’s start some threads. Here’s where you will really see even a bigger difference that leaves you scratching your head in befuddlement.

Let’s say I write a thread in the facebook sub-forum with the heading, “I love facebook!”. In the current permalink structure, it would look like this:

mydomain.com/forums/topic/i-love-facebook

Notice that looking at this permalink, you or a search engine, has no idea that it is a topic “inside” the facebook sub-forum, which is itself inside the “social media” forum!

Instead, for some strange reason only clear to the early developers, the topic is just floating by itself in “topic land” and has no relation whatsoever to “forum land”

But it should look like this:

mydomain.com/forums/social-media/facebook/i-love-facebook

Now this permalink makes sense. For one, it follows the progressive location of the thread. First, it is on the site, second, it is within forums, third, it is in the social-media forum, and fourth, it is within the facebook sub-forum which is inside the social-media forum. And finally, the thread is called “i-love-facebook”.

Hope that makes things clear why your suggestion of simply removing the /forum/ slug does nothing to actually address what is wrong with the permalink structure of bbPress.