I recently upgraded my old 0.8.3.1 bbPress to version 0.9.0.2. For the most part, the upgrade went great!

However, during the upgrade, all forum slugs were “recalculated”, so if I had manually edited my forum slugs, they were overwritten.

By way of example, say I ran this forum and I created a forum named “Super Troubleshooting”. If I had activated pretty permalinks, the URL for this forum would be: http://bbpress.org/forums/forum/super-troubleshooting.

Then, say I manually went in and changed the “forum slug” to be “superdupertroubleshooting” (for SEO reasons). So now the URL for that forum would be: http://bbpress.org/forums/forum/superdupertroubleshooting.

When I upgraded from 0.8.3.1 to 0.9.0.1, the upgrade function “recalculated” the forum slug using the forum title. In our example, this would change the URL from http://bbpress.org/forums/forum/superdupertroubleshooting to http://bbpress.org/forums/forum/super-troubleshooting.

I looked in the code, and this is all controlled by function bb_upgrade_process_all_slugs() in /bb-admin/upgrade-functions.php. Reading the code, it seems like the code also “recalculates” slugs for topics too!

“Recalculating” the slugs for all forums and topics seems like an odd design decision to me, because it changes URLs so the webmaster loses Google juice. I was going to create a ticket in Trac, but maybe I’m missing something. Is there a good reason to “recalculate” slugs when upgrading a bbPress installation?

[@_ck_ Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

That’s really interesting and definitely would be really annoying.

There’s never been an official mechanism to change slugs in bbPress but it should not touch them during upgrades.

I have to assume there was a bug in 0.8.3 where it would create bad or invalid slugs and that was some kind of attempt to fix the issue in the newer 0.9 code.

Be sure to note this in TRAC, otherwise it might not be seen by the developers.