Broken links post-'upgrade'

vegasgroom

The following two thread links no longer work; they don't redirect to the proper new link:

10/11/12 Reviews Part 1 - Nevada-Las Vegas
http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_nevada-las-vegas_101112-reviews-part-1

10/11/12 Reviews Part 2 - Nevada-Las Vegas
http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_nevada-las-vegas_101112-reviews-part-2

Just doing my part as a member of the community to let you know your upgrade broke something since I'm no longer a moderator.

[Deleted User]

Thank you! Will forward these to our tech team.

vegasgroom

I've found more examples and I have a feeling the issue might be occurring on threads where there were multiple pages of posts in the old forum system.  In the old system, multi-page thread URL's took the following format:

forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/CATEGORY_BOARD_THREADTITLE_#

So 'category' would be something like wedding-boards, underscore, board would be something like chit-chat, underscore, the title of the thread without underscores if they had been used, underscore, and a page number.

Now it's /discussions/THREAD#/THREADTITLE/p#

Whomever is operating the web server handling incoming forum requests likely has implemented some form of what would be called a redirect; it looks at old-format URL's as they're received, then attempts to redirect the visitor's browser to the matching new-format URL to pull up the proper thread.  They most likely have an error in the rewrite logic that is not properly dealing with multi-page threads of the old format.

Threads where the poster ended their thread title with a number may also be screwed up.

Just some hints for whoever deals with this to use as a starting point..

After looking for old threads on behalf of users of my old forum, I have run into this several times now so I started digging into it further.  To find some of these URL's, I did the following Google search:

"first few pages" inurl:Sites/theknot site:forums.theknot.com

What that does is looks for the text "first few pages" in the document, only on the website forums.theknot.com, and the text "Sites/theknot" must appear in the URL, which means it will only return matches for the old format links.  The purpose of using the text "first few pages" is because often in long threads, it's common to see someone type something along the lines of "I scanned the first few pages of this thread...." or similar, so I figured that search would help me find threads that had spanned multiple pages.

Just on the first page of results it revealed numerous now-broken links, but you can still pull up the cached copy of it in Google, so it's easy to see that the page did exist recently; they'll even tell you the last time they scanned it:

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_chit-chat_head-meet-desk-mini-vent-nwr

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_questions-ask-potential-photographer

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_etiquette_shower-thank-cardsdoes-fi-sign

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_new-jersey_welcome-helpful-links-tips

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_diy_hey-diy-girls

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_massachusetts-boston_aw-happy-monday-wedding-porn

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/wedding-boards_diy_photo-bookguest-book

http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/local-wedding-boards_michigan-detroit_unofficial-knottie-rules


If I can pull all those just from the first page of results, there are likely tens of thousands of links that are now broken given the fact that there's 1.5 million threads or so on the forums, of which a small percentage span pages.

It's pretty important that this get fixed soon because now that the links to content Google knew about are bad, they will ultimately drop all of those old cached pages and the information that people are searching for will disappear with it.  Many of these pages may contain useful information.

[Deleted User]

Thanks, Vegas! I just sent the thread to tech to go over.

[Deleted User]

Just heard back from tech and they are aware of the problem with redirecting. This is a priority for the team so they hope to solve it soon.