People seem to be using URLs more and more to redirect users to other discussions either relating to that discussion or to help point the user in the right direction (e.g. giving a new user the URL for the rules page). Since the tags seem to not work (at least, when this discussion was made), people happen to just copy the URL of a discussion and paste it after a colon, hyphen, etc.

Short Explanation

Issue:

• Posted links don't work (e.g. http://forums.damenspike.com/view/161-Official - Forum Rules/ )

How to Solve:

1. Find the category the discussion is in, find the discussion, click the link to the discussion, copy the URL
2. Search the discussion via title or tags, click the link to the discussion (more than one discussion may appear, so be careful), copy the URL
3. (not recommended) view the user who created the discussion's posts, find the discussion, click the link to the discussion, copy the URL

Detailed Explanation

The issue I'm wanting to address is the minor problem occurring when a user posts a URL that doesn't automatically link to the page that has that URL. an example of this would be the rules page. If you were to go to the "Rules" tab and copied the URL straight from there, you would get this:

http://forums.damenspike.com/view/161-Official - Forum Rules/ .

If you notice, the URL isn't cooperating as it should by not turning into a link (only part of it is).

The reason this problem happens is because the URL experiences too many percent signs and unusual text that makes it think the URL ends too early and so it stops abruptly.

There are two ways of fixing this. One way is by clicking the category that the discussion is in, find the discussion, click the link to it, and copy the URL from there. You can see the category of the discussion directly above the actual discussion:



The URL should be much shorter and should end with a "view/?id=[discussion id]". The other way of fixing this issue is first going to the "Search" tab:



After you click the tab, you will be given to enter either the title of the discussion, tag/tags of the discussion, or the user of the discussion. The easiest way to find the discussion you want is to enter the title of the discussion, as tags in discussions are complicated and finding the user will only lead you to the person's profile page.

Note: When typing in tags or the title of the discussion, it does not require you to enter the entire title/list of tags. However, you must be exact when typing it in. This means if I were to use the Rules discussion, I would have to search "Official - Forum Rules" in that order, starting with whichever character I may choose. This means I can search "cial - For" and I will still be able to have the discussion listed. You cannot say anything out of order nor add anything to the existing title, otherwise you won't find the discussion you're looking for. This means you cannot search "Rules Forums", "Official Forum Rules", nor "Official - Forum Rules by Damen". The resulting URL should be the same URL that the first way does.

There actually is a third way, but it is highly not recommended for when users make multiple posts/discussions. The third way is to click the user's name of the discussion, which will take you to their profile page. Then you click "View Posts". If the discussion was made a while ago and the user has made many posts, you'll have to search for quite a bit to find the discussion, which is why this isn't recommended. When you do find the discussion, click the link, then copy the URL. the URL should be similar to the other two ways, but without the "?id=" and instead does "[discussion id]-/"

I know this is a lot of things to remember for such a minor error, but I see it happen frequently and people never seem to get it right. I'm sorry there weren't many visuals to this, but I didn't want everything to look too spaced out.

I hoped this helped and thanks for reading.

Nice post! Yes, this is correct about links, and Im sure people will follow this as an example. It is probably a bug, and I expect it's fixable.

Nice job, keep It up!

Great post! This will really help new users. Keep up the good work. +1

Wow! This helped me a lot!

Thank you so much!
This has really helped me a BUNCH!
Thanks again!
+1

~GirlyGirly

Quote:

Nice post! Yes, this is correct about links, and Im sure people will follow this as an example. It is probably a bug, and I expect it's fixable.



Nice job, keep It up!

Yes, I always like the effort SecretR puts into his posts ~Luke