Check out how many people thought this weblog entry on a local cellular phone plan was a forum. Hell, even I played along when I closed it off. Since a weblog (with comments enabled) already *is* a forum, the answer to your question is forums already have URI structures like weblogs. We just call them weblogs.
Matt: There could be benefits, but there could also be some serious drawbacks. My blathering about locking of something like a post slug would pretty well have to be done. [I’d argue that topic titles should never be a part of the URL.]
Topics on a forum really do need to be incrementally numbered and that number needs to be known, I think. You’ll go over the same arguments again and again, and five people, if they don’t pay attention, will start very similar topics if they’re all eager to be the first one to start it. Unless you’ve got a damn good merging function, this is a nightmare.
Do I wish for cleaner URLs at times? Yeah. Would it have to be idiot-proofed? Absolutely. I’ve got a bunch of forum users who could really give a crap what the URL looks like as long as it takes them where they want to go.
Or take an existing forum and reformat it into a blog! phpBB Blog does this very thing.
When I commented on my trouble with Dell, little did I know it would turn into a soapbox for Dell Sucks the number of comments against Dell tech support are enormous.
Keep up the good work, I’m trying to find time to look at WordPress, maybe this week.
I’m not sure if that’s suitable. The date a forum discussion started is not important really (it’s the ‘comments’ that count). forum.com/topic/title-of-forum-post would probably make more sense.
Matt’s format would work up until the point that Geof mentioned; when someone tries to start a topic with a post slug that would match that of another pre-existing post. What might make more sense is to break it down to the monthly parameter, then throw in the post_id rather than the day it was posted. So something like …
/support/2004/08/$post_id/thread-title
At first it might seem a little confusing to users, but again the issue of multiple posts w/ the same slug title would evolve. The “post-slug” could not be a unique column in the mysql database as well. I think I just repeated myself …
If you chuck in the post id, then the end bit could be whatever you wanted, it wouldn’t have to be unique, you wouldn’t even need to process it, so it would be there simply for decorative perposes, google puposes or whatever reason you use your “friendly” url
If the post id was invalid, you could then grab the end text and stick this into your seach engine ALA Mike Davidson
Check out how many people thought this weblog entry on a local cellular phone plan was a forum. Hell, even I played along when I closed it off. Since a weblog (with comments enabled) already *is* a forum, the answer to your question is forums already have URI structures like weblogs. We just call them weblogs.
Matt: There could be benefits, but there could also be some serious drawbacks. My blathering about locking of something like a post slug would pretty well have to be done. [I’d argue that topic titles should never be a part of the URL.]
Topics on a forum really do need to be incrementally numbered and that number needs to be known, I think. You’ll go over the same arguments again and again, and five people, if they don’t pay attention, will start very similar topics if they’re all eager to be the first one to start it. Unless you’ve got a damn good merging function, this is a nightmare.
Do I wish for cleaner URLs at times? Yeah. Would it have to be idiot-proofed? Absolutely. I’ve got a bunch of forum users who could really give a crap what the URL looks like as long as it takes them where they want to go.
Or take an existing forum and reformat it into a blog! phpBB Blog does this very thing.
When I commented on my trouble with Dell, little did I know it would turn into a soapbox for Dell Sucks the number of comments against Dell tech support are enormous.
Keep up the good work, I’m trying to find time to look at WordPress, maybe this week.
That’s not what I meant at all. The front and forum pages would still be just like they are now, but the URIs for the threads wouldn’t be like
/support/3/12345but instead
/support/2004/08/07/the-thread-titleI’m not sure if that’s suitable. The date a forum discussion started is not important really (it’s the ‘comments’ that count). forum.com/topic/title-of-forum-post would probably make more sense.
Matt’s format would work up until the point that Geof mentioned; when someone tries to start a topic with a post slug that would match that of another pre-existing post. What might make more sense is to break it down to the monthly parameter, then throw in the post_id rather than the day it was posted. So something like …
/support/2004/08/$post_id/thread-title
At first it might seem a little confusing to users, but again the issue of multiple posts w/ the same slug title would evolve. The “post-slug” could not be a unique column in the mysql database as well. I think I just repeated myself …
If you chuck in the post id, then the end bit could be whatever you wanted, it wouldn’t have to be unique, you wouldn’t even need to process it, so it would be there simply for decorative perposes, google puposes or whatever reason you use your “friendly” url
If the post id was invalid, you could then grab the end text and stick this into your seach engine ALA Mike Davidson
I hope my link works 🙂
Having the idea in there like now would be convienent, but I don’t want to clutter the URIs just for search engines.
I was going to hack MT so that it would power a forum, to show that it could be done. It turns out someone’s already done it:
http://www.stanthecaddy.com/seinfeld-forum.html
Apparently it’s powered by MT, with decent thread URLs.
What if a forum had a URI structure like a blog instead of a forum?
Google Search will start performing bettert than forum search. WP Forums is a good close example.