URL Redirection of Old Forum

scitommy

Hi,

I'm trying to redirect my old forum post URL's to my new flarum forum URL's.

I've actually succeeded with redirections going to the right post, but only to the number in the URL (ex: forum/d/32425) and not the file name after (ex: forum/d/32425-example-filename-words)

My current redirection looks like this /forum/d/$1 [L,NC,R=301,NE]

I don't know what to add after $1 to get the post file name.

If anyone has an idea, please help.

Thanks,

Thomas

clarkwinkelmann

There's no need to have id + slug, With id alone Flarum will automatically show the right discussion and even complete the url once the page is loaded ?

If you have the same slugs in the old forum url you could use a rewrite rule that captures it as $2 and add it afterwards. If you want help on that we need to see your full RewriteRule and an example of your old urls.

scitommy

Thanks for your response.

Yeah, the redirection I currently have set up in my old forum .htaccess root directory directs to the right flarum post, but only the ID number shows in the URL (ex. d/postID) and not the whole flarum url with slug. It does load the slug in the URL only if I scroll down the posts page. It adds the slug + a number.( ex. -slug/4).

My old forum's post URL's were /forum/name-of-forum/postID.php. I didn't have a slug for the posts.

The Post Id's for both old and new flarum forums are exactly the same.

My redirection .htaccess file in my old forum root directory looks like this:
RewriteRule [^{/]+/([\d]+)-([\d]+).php} https://www.domain.com/newforum/d/$1 [L,NC,R=301,NE]
RewriteRule [^{/]+/([\d]+).php} https://www.domain.com/newforum/d/$1 [L,NC,R=301,NE]

Like I said above, it redirects to the right posts with the ID in the URL, but not the whole URL with the flarum slug.

I guess if it recirects to the right place, I shouldn;t worry about it, but I have OCD and want it to go to the whole URL with slug.

clarkwinkelmann

You're right, you need to scroll to trigger an url update.

Without the slug in the previous url, an htaccess file won't be enough to handle it. You could create a script to do the redirection, which uses a dump of the flarum key-slug pairs or has access to the new database.

But I think that's really overkill for that.

I also migrated a forum some time ago, and also just redirected the IDs (here in Cloudflare page rules):

Had no issue so far with only-IDs redirects. Unless you're hardcore into SEO performance I don't think it will matter.

scitommy

clarkwinkelmann Thanks. I guess I'll have to make do with the ID redirect. It goes to the right place ?

I am into SEO though. I would think that (in the short-term) duplicate URLs is probably better option than 1000's of 404's.

I'll try to find a way to make use of canonical url tags, if there is a way (with an extension?). That would probably fix the duplicate URL issue.