More Descriptive links on the forum now.

[tim]

This originated from Ofnuts' post on GF about how the link is no longer friendly.

Previously, when were on bakon[dot]ca I purchased an SEO extension that would make all our links wordy so that it's Google Search Engine friendly.
However, after moving to gimplearn.net this extension stopped working and I had to turn this extension off (disabled/removed).
And as a result many wordy old links were broken (hopefully we fixed most of them if not all of them by now).

Anyways, since Ofnuts mentioned this, I thought I'd try and makes the links more descriptive by custom hacking (without extension).

So links to forums now have a forum_desc=<FORUM_NAME>
and links to topics now have a desc=<TOPIC_TITLE> and posts now have a desc=<POST_SUBJECT>

FORUM_NAME, TOPIC_TITLE and POST_SUBJECTS that have non alphanumeric characters are all converted to hyphens(-).

So now you'll notice more descriptive links, my hope is that Google search engine will find it more friendly. I figure it doesn't hurt to try and also old links will still work because they don't have the desc or forum_desc fields in the links but we don't use it those values at all, it's only for friendly link purposes so it doesn't hurt to pass them along.

For example:
You'll notice links like these now (Hopefully more Google Search Egnine friendlier)
/viewforum.php?forum_desc=GIMP-Tutorials&f=10
/viewtopic.php?forum_desc=GIMP-Tutorials&desc=Create-a-Mummy-texture-and-a-Text-Effect&f=10&t=986
instead of (than these)
/viewforum.php?f=10
/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=986

[tim]

I changed the links so that instead of query string after ?
The descriptive portion goes in front of the ? mark now
so we get links like these:
/viewforum.php/GIMP-Tutorials?f=10
/viewtopic.php/GIMP-Tutorials/Create-a-Mummy-texture-and-a-Text-Effect?f=10&t=986

I think this is nicer looking and it looks more like it's actually part of page title.

[tim]

Interesting, this syntax only seems to work on GL.
It doesn't work when i tried it on gimpchat.com.