CliffordK

Mmmm... What a mess.
Ok, so a Google Search brought up:

https://www.bikeforums.net/road-cycling/1201694-colnago-titanio-bititan.html
New Format:
https://www.bikeforums.net/road-cycling-41/colnago-titanio-bititan-1201694/

So, there are 3 changes that happened:

For multi-page documents:
Old Format:
https://www.bikeforums.net/politics-religion/1140457-just-headline-388.html
New Format:
https://www.bikeforums.net/politics-religion-250/just-headline-1140457/page392/

Ok, so the page number is appended to the end of the topic. In a sense the new format is more intuitive.

However, it has caused broken links and shortcuts everywhere, as well as broken web searches.

billytwosheds 

Chiming in to say I noticed my bookmarks to BF all broken the other evening, and as someone who works in IT, I understand these things happen. Usually a human-related oops.

That said, it's unlikely that the tech team was unaware of the issue before the weekend, and so should have fixed and/or rolled the change back. The distance between the mods and the actual tech support for the site is, um, a little worrisome.

CliffordK

These seem to be some kind of virtual link to a database. It should be possible to program the system to recognize the old format and automatically convert to the new format.

Then after a few years, when the dust settles, one might consider abandoning the obsolete format (realizing the risk of breaking historic links).

smontanaro 

I realize the two industries aren't similar, but when I worked in finance it was common to place moratoriums on updates in advance of holidays or major financial announcements. Even critical bug fixes required some approval. Still, applying an update before a long weekend (on a website which garners a large amount of traffic on weekends) seems ill-considered. If nothing else, the update procedure should include a couple spot checks before calling it good.

livedarklions

I think adding the number back to the forum name is the only change that's causing my problems. I suspect they did that by mistake.

Wongway

Didn’t even realize this thread was here way down at the bottom of the pile of forums. Shouldn’t they have a post up top in one of the community connections forums?

CliffordK

Scrambling the entire format of the URL (number after the subforum, number to the end of the topic, and change in page number format) is why people have reported that simply fixing the number after the subforum is inadequate to fix broken Google searches and hyperlinks to specific topics.

I do have a tendency to go to the address bar and type in say "mec" to bring up the mechanics subforum. That will eventually get better. And, I've figured out that I can:

Go to the address bar.. type in "mec" to get:
https://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics/
append a dash: https://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics-
And, it properly pops up with the full address:
https://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics-10/

If one wants, one can delete the incorrect search options from Firefox.

BillyD

It's a long holiday weekend, it's not a tragic-emergency, it's a minor inconvenience, so no need to call up the National Guard.

There's a simple work-around . . . type in bikeforums.net and once you're in you can navigate wherever you want to go. Avoid old bookmarks and links you might have stored in your browsers, they ain't gonna work.

Seeya Tuesday!

BillyD

You're assuming there was an update immediately prior to this long holiday weekend. A non-essential update, at that. Well, they don't do such things without contacting the mod staff, and they're too savy to make ANY changes before ANY weekend. Thanks.

Sy Reene

Must be

smontanaro 

So they make breaking changes to the settings and nobody at Internet Brands checks in on the status of the system over the weekend? Something went wrong. Why was a breaking change of any kind (intentional, unintentional, software update, parameter change) necessary? It seems IB is a big enough company to have at least a skeleton crew on duty over the holiday weekend. (I count 54 "brands" featured on the IB website, BikeForums being one of them.)

I get it. This is a hobby website. It isn't my bank's website. Still, it is a website with a **** ton of external links buried in search engine databases, peoples' bookmarks, probably in any number of static web pages and other online forums. The search engine crawlers will adapt, and peoples' bookmarks can be updated manually (if somewhat painfully), but random static web pages and posts in other online forums (Classic Rendezvous, The Paceline, etc) will be broken indefinitely if the change isn't reverted.

Sy Reene

Maybe that's the first thing to be confirmed, whether or not in fact this change was intentional and they will revert; perhaps the oops was not telling the mods about it. One way or another there was an oops.

datlas 

Every little thing Bike Forums does is magic.

cudak888 

You're assuming that IB doesn't subcontract its back-end team - that would definitely account for the delay.

Keep in mind that this might have been caused by a server or plugin auto-update pushed to the Vbulletin software automatically - and it just happened to break the regex used to generate the permalink URL structure.

-Kurt

IBJoel

Hi guys, I'll see what's up. I believe it's an unintended side effect from a security update we did.

"Profitable" is often the enemy of "big". We have a skeleton crew for the entire year. I'm currently the only Community Manager for Travel & Leisure.

cudak888 

Forum and thread permalinks are back to normal at the C&V!

Thank you!

-Kurt

cb400bill

Forum may go on and off for a while as they are fixing stuff.

Sy Reene

Thanks for the info.
I'm not sure what a 'permalink' is.. but one thing that's still a bit wonky -- if I go to the link shown circled in photo below, which is this adddress
bikeforums.net/forum-suggestions-user-assistance-160/ It doesn't work. I get an "invalid forum specified" web page.

cudak888 

Permalinks are basically fixed URLs applied to the dynamic pages that the forum software creates (which the forum software knows by their assigned numbers, e.g. C&V is "181," and Forum Suggestions & User Assistance is "160."

Might want to clear your cache in regards to that breadcrumb link. On my end, it's https://www.bikeforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=160 which leads to the correct https://www.bikeforums.net/forum-sug...er-assistance/ URL.

-Kurt

IBJoel

OK guys, this should be fixed now

robreau

Whew. Much appreciated!

CliffordK

Thank you.

I've posted double links over the last few days... just in case the new links all got broken.

Sy Reene

I cleared my browser, still doesn't work for this forum. The first link you posted is the same for me, but redirects to the "-160" version of the forum. No issue in a couple other forums. However, also see similar happens in the bike mechanics forum. weird

Iride01 

I've had issues for the last three days with the hierarchy links at the top of the page to go back up to the sub-forum from a thread. However in every case, clearing my browser cache has solved it till the next day.

Not an ideal thing, but I'll be content to do that till it's all resolved.

CliffordK

So far everything seems to be back to normal here (Win 10/Firefox).

Keep in mind that any page that was open over the weekend could have incorrect links, and needs to be closed.

If your browser auto-opens a bunch of cached pages, close them all and start fresh.

I rarely use BF on a mobile device, so perhaps one would cache pages differently.