I tried to greet them but they weren't friendly at all. Damn "friendly" URLs! ... What is a friendly URL?
PS: Your avatar is broken.

of course this is waaay better, as you can finally see from the url what it is
like most news links

but obviously, now all the old links, especially through the forum, are all wrong and lead to 404, unless you kinda redirect them so that it works D=

http://www.java-gaming.org/posts/go-on-ask-me-anything/message-210832/view/topicseen.html#new brought me to page 1 instead of page 10 where there were a couple of new messages.

Only two bugs I can find are the two above.

On the other hand, the url in my signature updated to the new format automatically, neat!


He didn't rewrite the forum software but added a couple of rewrite rules, the old url's will still work

Mike

Only the URLs with 'topicseen' seemed to be affected. Navigating through pages of threads obviously was tested, and it didn't occur to me that 'topicseen' (reached from 'unread posts') was some kind of special case. Fixed now.

What was expected, what was the actual result?

BTW: message titles don't affect the URL, it's all about the title of the first post. If the topic title is changed, the friendly URL will not change, for obvious reasons.

I'm using a fairly inefficient approach: buffering the output of SMF into a string, unleashing regex and making a bunch of SQL queries, then sending the result to the browser. The mod_rewrite engine sends REQUEST_URI to a 'prg:/super_secret/mod_rewrite.php' which looks up the 'topic-title' in a new table, mapping topicid<->url_injected_title.

The whole process takes 3ms, which is perfectly acceptable, as SMF itself takes about 200-300ms per page.

well I just assumed that would be the case, but isn't
well done and stuff

yeah that's right.

Completely rewritten, to remove a SPOF*

Please report any (new) bugs.




* mysql_connect(...) completely breaks after you run service mysqld restart in a long-running PHP process, it tries to reconnect to the old file-descriptor, which is obviously invalid after mysqld comes back up. mod_rewrite -> RewriteMap prg: therefore could stop functioning and the whole forum would be down, forever. I currently store topic-ids and board-ids in the URL, so I can use plain and simple mod_rewrite -> RewriteRule to reconstruct the original SMF URL.

Doh!

Will fix that tomorrow-ish.