SEO friendly URLs within system emails

[Wayne Luke]

There is a changelog - http://tracker.vbulletin.com/secure/...&version=11669

We also run unit tests and don't release if they are failing. The QA team also runs automation tests on the entire system and runs manual tests on all the issues listed in the changelog above.

[Mark.B]

We publish lists of changes in each release, however this own't tell you of every consequential fix or issue, we cannot test every environment, every issue, every consequence, every configuration, there are multiple millions of possibilities there.

[dwwm]

Of course you are right. Actually I just hoped there would be a auto-generated changelog, unit tests or something similar, to find out FAST if there were a major changes on the routing component.
Whatever.. I hope an update will help.

[Wayne Luke]

Each new release covers over 100 bug fixes and updates to the system. Any one of them can affect routing which is crucial to the entire system.

[dwwm]

Ok thanks for your reply. I will consider an update.

[dwwm]

I just saw that the expected behavior is the case for this forum.

Here is an short example:

$ curl -ILk "https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/node/4382327"
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-5-connect/vbulletin-5-connect-questions-problems-troubleshooting/vbulletin-5-support-issues-questions/4382323-seo-friendly-urls-within-system-emails?p=4382327#post4382327
[...]

I'm using vb 5.3.1. https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/ uses 5.3.4.
Were there any bugfixes regarding the resolution of node-urls or what else could cause this problem?

[Wayne Luke]

If you link to a node that is a reply, it should link to that reply. If it doesn't then it is a bug. If you're using vBulletin 5.3.4 and this occurs, then you should create an issue in the tracker using the link in the navigation above.

[dwwm]

Actually I'm looking for a way to link posts, instead of threads, from the notification mails.
At the moment, the resolution of the none-seo-url works via several HTTP-redirects (301) like the following:

http://www.example.com/node/%threadid% -> http://www.example.com/forum/subforum/%threadid%-thread-seo-title

The problem is, when calling an url like

http://www.example.com/node/%postid%

it automatically resolves to the parent nodeid (thread) and the target url of the redirect will also be:

 http://www.example.com/forum/subforum/%threadid%-thread-seo-title

The expected result for me would be an url like:

http://www.example.com/forum/subforum/%threadid%-thread-seo-title?p=%postid%#post%postid%

[Mark.B]

Emails contain the node routing for simplicity and to minimise the chance of emails being spamtrapped, URLs breaking due to length, URLs breaking due to email clients misinterpreting special characters, etc.

The node routing will always work even if the option is turned off. All the option does is route by node *by default*, meaning all links in the forum use this method. It doesn't prevent route by node from working.

What you're looking for would require custom coding which we cannot provide support for.

I'm intrigued as to why you want SEO-friendly URLs in a place where SEO isn't relevant at all (a private email). Bearing in mind doing so will increase the chances of links breaking in emails, and of the email itself being treated as spam by the recipient's provider.

[dwwm]

Hi all,

I was just wondering how is it possible to include SEO-friendly urls within my vBulletin system emails (like new post/thread notifications, etc.).
Actually I already disabled the "Route Channels and Conversations by Node ID" setting within the global settings of vBulletin admin interface.
It seems this has only an impact to the linking of the forum itself, but the links contained by the mails are still like these: http://www.example.com/node/%id%

After some debugging, I found this implementation for the placeholder of the notification phrases:

core/vb/library/notification.php LINE 958

// We're using the node URL to avoid permission-related exceptions in other route constructors.
// Note that this doesn't seem to work with visitor messages, which is handled specially below
'nodeurl' => vB5_Route::buildUrl('node|fullurl', array('nodeid' => $contentnodeid)), 

From my point of view, if it is the correct place where the url value is generated, it could be hard to get some seo-like urls, without core-hacking vbulletin or extending it via extension.

Before investing more time, I hoped for a more easy solution. Maybe I just forgot enabling an option within the admincp?

Thanks for your help and best regards