So, having been around this forum a bit, I’ve noticed that, at some point, the url structure for topics changed from
hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/...
to
hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/...
.
While I do like the new url structure (much cleaner), this left many links to other threads broken.
I’ve noticed however, that the content under the previous url structure was migrated, so only a change of /forum/topic/
to /t/
is all that is needed to load the old content.
Much of the old content, while, well… old, is still pretty useful.
For example, I can think of pauls amazing lemur gems. Quite dated, but very useful still. But the threads refer to the other gems in the old url structure, so a user not knowing about this could very well miss out on those gems.
While I don’t know how the website is structured nor the backend powering it, I do know my way around SEO and websites in general, and I have an easy (should be easy?) suggestion that would not only improve user experience but also improve the sites SEO ratings.
So, I’m suggesting that the website redirect the old url structure to the new one, so say redirect
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/lemur-gems-2-inputmapper-delegates/
to
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/lemur-gems-2-inputmapper-delegates/
.
If the site is using expressjs somewhere in the backend, this is a simple middleware:
app.use((req, res, next) => {
if(req.url.startsWith("/forum/topic/")) res.redirect(301,req.url.replace("/forum/topic/","/t/"));
else next();
});