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@username brings thousends of broken links, bad for SEO

phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
edited January 2013 in Feedback

Hi all,

One of the basic features of Vanilla and also a good one has a massive downside. The @username link creator. My community adepts very well to this functionality, but within thousends of posts, users tend to misstype the usernames once and then. This leads to a lot of 404 and if you check your Google Webmaster tools you can see the broken links created.

Example - The username is @username, but people tend to write @usrnam, @usernam or similiar crazy ideas that only the devil is possibly able to lock into this world. Everyone of those misstyped creates a dead link. Abracadabra > 404.

I recently startet do maintain this (what a pain), by searching my forum for the broken links detected by Google Webmastertools. Let's see if this will improve my ranking or will affect my forums rating within search engines.

The Mentions Lookup Plugin could help, but for now it's not available for Button Bar and just for CLE.
http://vanillaforums.org/addon/mentionslookup-plugin

Another issue that it's not utf-8 ready. And so usernamens like @maunzbär (< hover it) do get shortened to @maunzbär and create another dead link.

Anyone else having issues with this.

  • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
  • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
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Comments

  • These links could be made no follow. They might be in never versions of 2.1 as they have it on this site.

    Mentions Lookup should be fine with button bar as that is not as WYSIWYG. Unless there is some javascript conflict (I haven tested), button bar doesn't affect the input, it is still a normal textbox.

    grep is your friend.

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

    OK, right. Thanx x00 you're right your Plugin works.

    Anyone else knows a workaround for the umlauts (äöüß) ?

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

    Does anyone of you know how to solve the "Umlauts" issue?

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
  • hbfhbf wiki guy? MVP
    edited January 2013

    @phreak said:
    Does anyone of you know how to solve the "Umlauts" issue?

    short of potentially rewriting some core code? hmmm... dont allow them in usernames? it's admittedly not a great answer, but i don't think there is a simpler solution.

  • it is about making the regular expression work multi byte, There are more problems with it like some connect accept userenames with spaces too.

    grep is your friend.

  • vrijvlindervrijvlinder Papillon-Sauvage MVP
    edited January 2013

    Does anyone of you know how to solve the "Umlauts" issue?

    yes, use Dutch instead !!! :)

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP

    Mmh, doesn't look like this is solved too easily. I do not follow the GitHub repository of Vanilla. Anyone seen this in progress there?

    @vrijvlinder: Exactly, my community would come to my house and burn it down. ;)

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
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