Automated redirect for old post/thread links

Fyron · #1 August 16th, 2008, 08:12 PM

Out of curiosity, why where the old ID values not simply preserved, and inserted into the vbulletin database? That would have made supporting the old link namespace a simple mod_rewrite rule.

Would it be too late to re-import ID values, thus absolving the need for such complex conversion scripts?

Richard · #2 August 16th, 2008, 08:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fyron

Out of curiosity, why where the old ID values not simply preserved, and inserted into the vbulletin database? That would have made supporting the old link namespace a simple mod_rewrite rule.

The vb import process tries to do things in a very clean way and because of that assigns a new post id/thread id starting at zero. It does preserve a concept of an import ID. I had written something to update all of the postID/threadID's to the old numbers but the one sticking point was threaded mode. Due to the way the parent/child post setup in vb works there was no easy way via sql to update the posts without breaking the parent posts used for threaded mode.

So instead I took some code from the vb import author and extended it a little.

Ballbarian · #3 August 16th, 2008, 08:44 PM

Ballbarian · #4 August 16th, 2008, 08:49 PM

This old image link is not working either:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...73-AomOrc3.JPG

Edit:
And here is an old link that used to go to the dom3 forums that gives me a permissions error instead of the page not found:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...at=&Board=dom3

Richard · #5 August 17th, 2008, 05:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

This old image link is not working either:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...73-AomOrc3.JPG

Edit:
And here is an old link that used to go to the dom3 forums that gives me a permissions error instead of the page not found:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...at=&Board=dom3

Okay all old uploads should redirect now so #1 should work. For #2 what I did is anything with postlist.php goes to a generic page on the new forum. Since we have no way to determine what the old crappy (editorial comment on UBB software

) word based forum names to the new forum numbers we can't do a better automated solution...

Richard · #6 August 17th, 2008, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

Okay all of these should work now. Let me know...

Ballbarian · #7 August 17th, 2008, 05:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard

Okay all of these should work now. Let me know...

Great!

All appear to be working now with one exception:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=528292

That old thread link was working with some of your changes (earlier), but now goes to the 404 page.

Richard · #8 August 17th, 2008, 06:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

Great!

All appear to be working now with one exception:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=528292

That old thread link was working with some of your changes (earlier), but now goes to the 404 page.

Okay this one may be able to be fixed but I am not sure. The problem is most incoming links have an & after the post number and the redirect is looking for that. These types of url's don't have an & at the end so it's confused

. Let me think on that one...

lch · #9 August 18th, 2008, 10:26 AM

Richard, thanks for looking into this. I'd recommend that you create substitutes for the old showflat.php, shownested.php etc. scripts instead of abusing 404 error pages for this.

I'll drop some PHP code here which I have been using for some projects myself. First, a replacement for PHP's parse_url function:

PHP Code:


			
// returns an array with the following elements defined in it:
//   scheme://username:password@host:port/path?query#fragment
// this function is more robust than parse_url

function parseUrl($url) {
  $r  = '!(?:(?<scheme>\w+)://)?(?:(?<username>\w+)\:(?<password>\w+)@)?(?<host>[^/:]+)?';
  $r .= '(?:\:(?<port>\d*))?(?<path>[^#?]+)?(?:\?(?<query>[^#]+))?(?:#(?<fragment>.+$))?!i';
  preg_match($r, $url, $out);
#  for ($i = 0; $i < 9; ++$i)
#    unset($out[$i]);
  return $out;
}

then one which does the reverse:

PHP Code:


			
// inverse function to parseUrl

function glueUrl($parsed)
{
  if (!is_array($parsed)) return false;
  $uri = strlen($parsed['scheme']) ? $parsed['scheme'].':'.((strtolower($parsed['scheme']) == 'mailto') ? '' : '//') : '';
  $uri .= strlen($parsed['user']) ? $parsed['user'].(strlen($parsed['pass']) ? ':'.$parsed['pass'] : '').'@' : '';
  $uri .= strlen($parsed['host']) ? $parsed['host'] : '';
  $uri .= strlen($parsed['port']) ? ':'.$parsed['port'] : '';
  if (strlen($parsed['path'])) {
    $uri .= ($parsed['path'][0] == '/') ? $parsed['path'] : ('/'.$parsed['path']);
  }
  $uri .= strlen($parsed['query']) ? '?'.$parsed['query'] : '';
  $uri .= strlen($parsed['fragment']) ? '#'.$parsed['fragment'] : '';
  return $uri;
}

and finally something which uses both to merge a given URL with a query string, which shows how they can be used:

PHP Code:


			
// merges given URL with the specified query string

function MergeQueryStrings($url, $query) {
  $parsed = parseUrl($url);
  parse_str($query, $addq);
  parse_str($parsed['query'], $oldq);
  $newq = array_merge($oldq, $addq);
  $parsed['query'] = http_build_query($newq);
  return glueUrl($parsed);
}

Maybe it's some help. What you really should make use of is the parse_str function.