[Solved] 301 redirect help with regex needed after wp embed

Pixelnated

I am getting a TON of bots and users with 404 errors after embeding my forums.

I used the same directory name but the # in the path is what is breaking it.

eg: it went from -> http://mysite.com/forum/discussion/15074/test-topic
to -> http://mysite.com/forum/#/discussion/15074/test-topic

I thought maybe adding a redirect to my htaccess may fix it but I am not the best at regex. Does this look right?

RedirectMatch http://mysite.com/forum/\.(.*)$ http://mysite.com/forum/#/$1

Thanks!

Pixelnated

I figured out how to handle this in WordPress with the Redirection Plugin
I'll share what I did in case anyone else runs into it

First - I saw some old phpBB entries coming in with the pattern like this (which I was using before porting over to vanilla)

To fix old phpbb links to new vanilla links
* Original Source - http://freakscene.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=13833&start=805
* Target - http://freakscene.net/forum/#/discussion/13833/

Regex used to redirect it
- Source - /forum/viewtopic(.*)t=(\d*)&(.*) - Target - /forum/#/discussion/$2/

I added a second one to catch those that don't have post start info (no start)
- Source - /forum/viewtopic(.*)t=(\d*) - Target - /forum/#/discussion/$2/

My pre to post embed vanilla links (with the #) I used this
- Source - /forum/discussion/(.*) - Target - /forum/#/discussion/$1

And for direct comment links in vanilla
- Source - /forum/discussion/comment/(.*) - Target - /forum/#/discussion/comment/$1

And for profile links in vanilla
- Source - /forum/profile/(.*) - Target - /forum/#/profile/$1

Anyway, it may give you a starting point if you are hitting this sort of thing.

The ones I listed above & addressed were showing up as 404 errors after embedding (mostly from search engines and old incoming links) but this fixed it.

If there is a more graceful pattern or better way to do it I welcome it

tjforsythe

I edited the Vanilla Forums Wordpress plugin file vanilla-forums/widgets.php and modified the line

$link_url = vf_get_link_url($options);

to hard code my path.

Graceful, no. Easy, yes.

Pixelnated

Nice

The majority of the links I had to correct were from external sources so I the redirect worked great for me. While I was in there I adjusted some internal ones based on the patterns as well.