Oh right, that list shows the sitemap URLs manually submitted to Google? Not the ones discovered automatically by Google? I have not used their dashboard in a very long time.
I see there's a number of "discovered URLs" at the end, based on the numbers I guess it means Flarum correctly discovered the intermediate sitemap files and just doesn't show them.
If it's indeed like this, then the list in MikeJones post seems to show 2 sitemaps that resolved to the same 420 pages. You can remove either one. I would recommend adding only the sitemap.xml one, but if you know you are only going to use runtime mode, adding sitemap-live/index is also fine, it will allow Google to skip one redirect.
And it must mean the screenshot in typ1k post actually shows a successful crawl. The last entry is correct and shows 38 discovered URLs. The first 2 entries can simply be removed.
There shouldn't be any need to submit the live URLs anywhere. You just need to share the /sitemap.xml URL with search engines and they should figure everything out by themselves.
Some extra info about the URLs:
While we will try to avoid breaking changes as much as possible, everything happening under sitemap-live/* is not really supposed to be public API. The URLs could be renamed in a future update, and the number of files might change. As long as you point the search engines to sitemap.xml, then it'll work in any version of the extension.
The same thing is true of the cached mode. You can point the search engine directly to the index file in the public folder, but if you use sitemap.xml it will seamlessly transition to a different location if you change where the sitemap is stored. It's not possible to change the location in the current version without code, but with some custom code it's possible to store them on any Flysystem-compatible disk. Blomstra stores the sitemaps on S3 using that method, which is one of the reasons behind this refactor.
