Post links that won't break when a member is deleted...

Maybe this has already been communicated but I've discovered an extremely frustrating "feature" of the forum.

With the recent deletion of a prodigious posting member massive numbers of post links are broken throughout the site. The problem is these aren't even links to the deleted member's posts. What has happened is with his posts deleted the page number on which another user's post appears have changed. As a result if he had posted in a thread anyone who linked to a post after one of his deleted posts may have that link now broken. This has included many folk's build threads which have an index post at the start. One member's award winning build thread had over 200 broken links.

For reasons best known to the author of the forum software the links to posts include page number of the post despite the post already having a unique post ID number! Near as I can tell there is no way to link to a post without including the page number and this page number can change whenever a member is deleted with all their posts then being deleted.

This is extremely destructive to TW as a resource as there are years and years of information cross-linked around the forum. That is now all effectively destroyed.

I'd encourage the moderators to either find a way for us to post links that do not include the non-static page number or else in the future consider very carefully whether it is worth deleting a user even when requested as it presently has a nasty side effect which greatly diminishes the value of TW as an information resource.

EDIT: There is a way to post a link without a page number (my first try at this failed but I did some more experimenting). The problem is that when you go to get a so called "permalink" to a post the link provide does include the page number and these are the kinds of links that will break when pagination changes due to post deletions. So the so called "permalink" is anything but.

So, prevent problem in the future solution is to change the "permalink" to not include the page.

Fix the old problems would be to have the forum software ignore the unnecessary and unstatic "page" field in a link and only parse the post number. That would fix all the broken links now on the site due to the recent member deletion.

EDIT2: An example of what "permalink" should produce to be actually useful:

The correct thing to do is use a different link format that doesn't include the page:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/posts/18622284/

instead of the craptacular one that "permalink" provides:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...eep-things-light.409330/page-52#post-18622284

Not sure if there is actually any control over the forum software to make that change...

 

Thanks @tcBob - awesome news. Does this mean I don't have to update all my existing links, or are those still going to be broken? (I updated my TOC in my build, but didn't go update everything else throughout it).

@DVexile - glad to have been in good company when I asked about this a couple weeks ago!

Happy Turkey Day both of ya!

 

Awesome! Thank you! One of those subtle things that isn’t obviously a problem until it happens. So glad you could implement a site wide fix!

 

Bob, You are the best forum operator in history. A thousand thank you's!

You rock! Thank you for taking the time to speak up about this!