Crosslink updates

So, after all my griping about the thread numbers changing after
the vBulletin upgrade, I've been digging in and trying to update
my webpages to point to the correct new numbers. Between
Priuschat itself and my external stuff I've got over a dozen links
that needed to be fixed, and I'm still wading through it. In case
anyone else is interested in following up and re-establishing
correct linking, here's how I've been going at it.
.
First, you need the old thread number, which you probably have
already from the broken link. It will likely be part of a URL that
looks like ...priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=NNNNN
.
Danny has kindly pointed me at a useful archive facility in which
all of the old database is intact, but readonly and sans pictures.
If you access priuschat.com/old_ipb/index.php?showtopic=NNNNN,
there is the old thread. From that you can look and determine
the author, the board section it was in, and the post date.
Example: to find Galaxee's "engine reseal" post, you can use
http://priuschat.com/old_ipb/index.php?showtopic=30906 where
30906 is the thread containing the original post and all the
followup. [Danny has also fixed things so that non-logged-in
visitors can download the Priuschat-hosted pictures, which is
very useful to keep us as a Great Internet Resource.]
.
Armed with the author, topic title, and section, you can either
grope around in the new archive tree, accessible via
http://priuschat.com/forums/archive/ ... or start a search on
the poster's username and one or two keywords from the title.
Title-only search is fairly fast and doesn't burden the board
too much, even if it's going way back. With a little looking
around it's pretty fast to find the new home of the old post,
which in the case of our example is the longish URL [somewhat
shortened for readability, but note carefully where it points]:
http://priuschat.com/forums/pri...on/29957-1g-pri...seal.html
and if you follow the link you see the same thread [*with* pix!].
.
Now, an interesting thing about the new vBulletin. If all you
have is a thread number, you don't need to specify an exact forum
section or subject-based title. URL request parsing apparently
only looks for some placeholders and then sniffs the number out
of it and that's all it cares about when accessing the database.
Thus, the above long cumbersome link can be reduced to
http://priuschat.com/forums/x/29957-x.html and still work.
The required elements seem to be the directory /forums/, some
arbitrary placeholder as the next level down (/x/), and the
thread number followed by another arbitrary string (-x) and .HTML.
That's it. You can drop the short form of the link into another
post or page, and Priuschat will issue a redirect to the "correct"
page once access is attempted. Most other vB based forum sites
work the same way, so you might find this helpful elsewhere too.
.
The new numbers are always slightly lower than the old ones, and
the disparity gap widens somewhat with the recent-ness of the
thread. Noting the new thread numbers while you're cruising the
new archive tree and comparing to the old one helps narrow down
which page of archives you want fairly quickly. Perhaps some day
someone will be enterprising enough to figure out exactly which
threads were lost in our second annual Great Database Fire.
.
So if you have old posts that cross-link each other, or external
pages that reference specific Priuschat material from the past,
it's not that hard to edit and update them to point to the correct
new places. I would encourage everyone to search for stuff you
authored, and the string "showtopic", which should quickly ferret
out any crosslinks you embedded in the past.
.
_H*

 

Oh, I should mention that Google and probably the other spiders
have picked up a good number of the new links, so if you vaguely
remember a topic and a keyword or two that may help in finding
some old stuff as well if PC's built-in search engine isn't
versatile enough. [and for multiple keywords, so far it
isn't -- I haven't found any valid "phrase" syntax to plunk
into it yet].
.
_H*