We set up a few forums with & in their title, like "Diet & Nutrition" but the friendly URL is ugly:

.../forum/92-diet-%26-nutrition/

I then noticed there wasn't a single forum here on IPS Community which had an & in the title.

Is there any way to get better support for & when the script builds a friendly URL?

Can we remove the %26 in the meantime some how?

Ours is OK:

"Foo.com Questions, Comments, & Suggestions" turns into /forum/23-foocom-questions-comments-suggestions/

That's interesting, thanks.

I went back and edited the titles in admin CP, removed the & sign and typed it again (just to be sure!) and then clicked submit. This seemed to fix the problem.

I wonder if I've found a bug? Some of the forums where we had %26 were brand new - but you can remove it by editing the forum after creating it?

sounds like it, unless somehow it was not a normal & typed the first time (I have no idea if there are other characters that look like one? doubt it though).

I can't duplicate this in 3.4 beta, so it's most likely a bug that has been fixed.

I can't reproduce this in 3.3 either... that character can't be used in Friendly URL's (it's used as a parameter separator in PHP) so we actively remove it.

How strange, some of the forums that had %26 in were forums I set up directly within Admin CP and while running the latest version.

There's an outside chance I copied and pasted them from a Google Doc if the helps at all? As in maybe it accidentally didn't clean up the code?

That's a possibility, yes.

That's what I was wondering also, but I didn't post it last time because I would have thought formating wouldn't matter for that, but it actually could be. Who knows. I've had a ton of weird things happen in ip.board for years and years which nobody can ever reproduce. A lot of my old topics even said the last poster in tehm was someone who was not the last poster. And some of my forums said they had a negative number of replies. lol

Ryan, I have never had a problem using the ampersand "&" in my forum names. I don't know why the OP is having problems with the ampersand but he might want to try "recaching" his forum from the board ACP. I've been having problems with installing plugins and various applications and usually recaching my forums seems to fix the problem.

Just to confirm that this is a bug - at least for my installation. I can replicate this, I just created a new forum with no copy/paste and had the %26 thing again.

Ryan (IPS) you are welcome to login and create (temporarily please, or with hidden perms) a forum with an & in it on my site - see old ticket for login details.

just tried it on mine and it worked fine. I only tried it quickly as a subforum.

Which version are you running?

I'll open a fresh support ticket so the IPS team can login to my server and see if they can replicate it themselves. Watch this space :)

I am using 3.3.4. It must be some issue which for some reaosn only happens under certain circumstances.

I think there's something missing here. Have you tried using Notepad to type your new forum name and then copy and paste that forum name into the field for your new forum name? If there are certain hidden attributes when you're typing directly into the field, this might fix the problem. I think there might be that when you type in your new forum name that something is hidden in your clipboard that is causing the special characters to appear.

I have to say that while it's happened to me when posting messages, it has never affected me when using the ACP. Typing in your forum name in Notepad and using the cut and paste method by transferring it from Notepad to ACP might indicate either something is trapped in your desktop clipboard or maybe there's something in your forum's cache that is doing this. Have you tried also to recache the contents of yoour forum? I do that about once per month, to ensure that my forum cache is clean.

Very odd. I went through last week (when I started this topic) and removed all the %26 from the forum names.

Just checked today and every time I have an & it's gone back to %26! Very strange one, scheduled task doing something?

Will open support ticket, but wanted to keep you all in the loop

wonder if there is database optimize and repair converting to ascii