IMO it would be a good idea to create some redirect from the topic that no longer exists to the newly formed merged topic upon merging topics. As it currently stands when you merge two topics, one just disappears and the link to it that users may have bookmarked or been indexed in searches just suddenly display an error saying it doesn't exist. If this would instead redirect them to the new topic it would be a much better operation situation.

I have suggested this before, it would be a great addition.

Very important to SEO and user experience.

Any news on this?

I would hate for this to be another one of those topics that gets set to internal review and forgotten about - it's a really important issue, and, in the grand scheme of things, shouldn't be too hard to implement either (though, yes, there are easier things, and I know that even when I give you the 24 characters that you need to add, you will still reject an issue as being not worth the effort, so I appreciate that I probably don't stand a chance with this one).

 

I'd like some type of automatic notification and / or PM sent to all members who posted in a topic that was merged into another.  I find often that a new member will post up a new topic that is similar to one that currently exists and a moderator will then see the similarity and merge topics.  My new member then returns to see that his topic was removed and likely never comes back to post future topics.  

Can an app be created to address this broken link issue mentioned in the first post of this topic?

This is not only an issue with merged topics but any topic that is renamed.

There is an advantage to having a topic accessible by topic ID only. Each topic URL in IPS already includes that ID so I assume it's just a matter of allowing topics to be displayed even if the SEO part doesn't match.

For example:

https://invisionpower.com/forums/topic/427291

This URL could also open this topic eventhough it doesn't have the topic title included in the URL.

14 minutes ago, Tomzl said:

This is not only an issue with merged topics but any topic that is renamed.

There is an advantage to having a topic accessible by topic ID only. Each topic URL in IPS already includes that ID so I assume it's just a matter of allowing topics to be displayed even if the SEO part doesn't match.

For example:

https://invisionpower.com/forums/topic/427291

This URL could also open this topic eventhough it doesn't have the topic title included in the URL.

If you change the URL from 427291 to 427291-anything-you-like, it will redirect to the correct place. It would be nice if it redirected with just the topic ID, but I think that would require significant changes to the friendly URL system to work automatically (though it could work if just having the number was added as a FURL template, but I don't know how well it would work with one being the canonical version of the other (that could be really bad for SEO if it doesn't actually redirect)).

I see. Then that is not such an issue but merged topics have always been a problem even with other forum software. Would be a nice feature to have though.

This will be available in 4.1.18.

Noice. No more dead links!

On 11/29/2016 at 2:38 PM, Charles said:

This will be available in 4.1.18.

Excellent. =)