Talk:Links to the DDO Forum

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As most people will be aware SSG changed some of their DDO URI structures recently. The DDO Forums used to have the URL: www.ddo.com/forums that has now essentially changed to: www.forums.ddo.com. Therefore any old hard-coded absolute links using the older [.../forums] in the DDO Wiki pointing to certain forum threads will possibly now fail to reach their destination. Similar will occur with links to ddo.com.

For example, visit: Update_53#Known_Issues: if you try clicking up the "Official U53.0.0 release notes on DDO.com" textual link it goes to a dead-end.

Also if you view: Smash and Burn and the quote from FlimsyFirewood, it of course will no longer link to Flimsy's profile/username. In that case it's not using a absolute "hard-coded" link for the thread; so the thread part will still correctly redirect.

⇒ Dywypi (Contribs • Message • Email) 05:22, April 18, 2022 (EDT)

• I have updated Template:Forum_user, Template:Release_notes to use the new path. ⇒ Cru121 (Contribs • Message • Email) 07:01, April 18, 2022 (EDT)

• The Wiki changes seem to have worked regarding the username value, e.g. Flimsy's ID, i.e. 696944. That actually uses a template.

However, the Wiki itself is using the incorrect outdated URI. For example within that Smash and Burn page the (template generated) quote: www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6209741#post6209741, gets "auto redirected" on the DDO server itself to: www.forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6209741#post6209741. That of course isn't the end of the world.

But, nonetheless any hard-coded absolute links in other places (not using: [Template XYZ]) leading to (ddo.com) will still be (mostly) pointing to the wrong places, and those won't actually redirect... with the exception of course with "Release notes".

What I'm basically saying is anything that is both: absolute and "hard-coded" (none template generated) pointing to the DDO domain and a specific page or forum thread isn't guaranteed to work - likely it will fail.

For example within: Best way to post a guide from the forum the link to that ToEE forum thread will of course no longer go nor redirect to that [458546] thread itself. The actual thread is obviously now: http://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/458546. I've just now used a absolute hard-coded link, which I've just advised against to illustrate LOL.

Maybe a Regular expression for changing actual FUNCTIONAL hyperlinks containing occurrences of: "ddo.forums.com" to "forums.ddo.com" could be deployed. Or would it risk the outcome: "The Wiki vanishes in a puff of logic.", i.e might unwittingly break something else.

⇒ Dywypi (Contribs • Message • Email) 08:28, April 18, 2022 (EDT)

Do I understand this correctly?

• Release notes - fixed - actually there's quite a lot of work here. Template only works for main releases. Plus some releases have the link hardcoded. Plus odd stuff at ddo.com end, such as 3 pages of U51 release notes.
• Forum users - fixed
• Forum links using T:Forums - works as is; could be eventually changed to skip the redirection at ddo.com
• Forum links in plain text - some links stopped working.

I don't know how to use bots, but this link says there are around 70 such links. Many are on obscure talk pages noone cares about. I guess some of these could be manually updated to use T:Forums or T:Forum user. ⇒ Cru121 (Contribs • Message • Email) 11:56, April 18, 2022 (EDT)

• Hm, this search pattern shows quite a few more pages. --Cru121
• Hm, and this has thousand hits; I guess we do need a bot for the job. --Cru121

• I'm not that familiar with what special functions are available with regards to the Wiki. Also my Template knowledge is near nonexistent. I just understand some of the basic concepts.

I know with the previous Wiki Search function it could sift through some code. Any textual (Source code) occurrence of: [[http://www.ddo.com/forums/ or [[https://www.ddo.com/forums/ certainly could theoretically be easily automatically found and replaced. I knew they'd also be a tool for finding hyperlinks - I just wasn't sure exactly where. Plus that old Search would actually show more complete results.

I don't really know what a Bot is, but I get the gist.

Furthermore I believe SSG are planning on using a different Forum package later this year. They may decide to relocate the location of the current vBulletin forum to an archive URL. In which case; the Forum URL could change yet again from www.forums.ddo.com/... to something other, etc. It's all good fun. ;-)

⇒ Dywypi (Contribs • Message • Email) 04:41, April 19, 2022 (EDT)

I have started experimenting with AWB. However, it's tricky because many older threads seem to be gone for good. Also the structure of ddo.com changed significantly, lot of things has to be done manually, for example, news or guides. Many older news seem to be gone. Maybe we should replace the links with web.archive.org links, but I couldn't do it because of some blacklist. Screen shots of the week are temporarily available somewhere, but should move again elsewhere. I think there's a lot of work to be done... And automation can only go so far. ⇒ Cru121 (Contribs • Message • Email) 06:07, April 19, 2022 (EDT)

• The older DDO vBulletin Forum would have used some variable output like "?=p=ID&id" instead of "ID=p=id", friendly URLs (https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/options_seofriendly_urls). The "broken link" pages on the forum exist they just reference the wrong (older) string ID format syntax. SSG/Turbine could have easily automatically converted them ALL to the current format using SQL queries (within 60-minutes) when they did the upgrade several years ago... However, they didn't have the inclination. :-)

⇒ Dywypi (Contribs • Message • Email) 04:48, April 20, 2022 (EDT)