Hi. I just got bbPress up and running this evening, and I’m really liking it so far. I have it configured for “pretty permalinks”, and I’m seeing a strange “replies” argument in the topic URLs. For instance:

http://example.com/topic/2?replies=1

This makes pretty permalinks not quite so pretty after all. I thought the whole idea was to minimize the arguments to be more search-engine friendly.

After looking through the source code, it doesn’t appear that this argument is actually used for anything functional. My best guess is that “replies” is an attempt at a cache-buster, so that the URL changes each time a new reply is posted. Wouldn’t it be preferable to simply set the “Last-Modified” header to the time of the most recent post?

It seems like this would achieve the same thing without ruining the pretty permalinks. Also, I notice that the bbpress.org support forums don’t have this extra argument. Can you share the magic?

Thanks.

[@trent Member 17 years, 11 months ago]

This forum has the same argument on replies. For example my URL for this post after I click submit will be:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/592?replies=2

Only consulation in short run is the URL works fine with yanking the replies part off the URL if you quote a thread somewhere else:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/592

The URL works as a way to show how many posts are in a thread, works as a way for feed readers of RSS to know which post is which, works for others to know as well. Not sure if Devs may have a better way to do this, but thanks for bringing it up!

Trent

[@patung Member 17 years, 11 months ago]

When I click that link, https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/592, it redirects to https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/592?replies=2

There is no way to get rid of the “?replies=” bit?

[@mikros Member 17 years, 11 months ago]

Hmm… last night, the bbpress “latest discussion” links did not have the “replies” bit. This morning they sure do though.

Interesting point about the RSS feeds. Because each post does not have its own URL, I guess this is a way to simulate it. Still, it seems there should be a “pretty” option for that as well. Something like:

http://example.com/topic/1/post/3

Instead of:

http://example.com/topic/1?replies=3

I may explore this with some mod_redirect rules and a little code hacking. Any bbpress devs around that can chime in? In my experience with Google (and others), it’s notably easier to get URLs like the first example above indexed.

[@breakaway Member 17 years, 10 months ago]

I just downloaded and installed the latest version and also have this “issue”..

Is there already a solution for this?

[@mdawaffe Member 17 years, 10 months ago]

The only reason the replies argument is there is for CSS: a quick and dirty way of differentiating between topics you’re up to date on and those you’re not (via a:visited { … }).

We should probably make sure we always 301 redirect to the latest URL.

Oh, and PS: Posts do have their own URL. This one’s is

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/592?replies=6#post-3870

[@breakaway Member 17 years, 10 months ago]

Ah, now i understand..and i just checked to see what happened if I logged out.

And yes! then the url works as desired. Well, that’s good enough for me as the searchengines will see it like they should: nice and pretty with no arguments!

thanks.