Pages not displaying normally

[Mach]

I have noticed this the last few days. Some of the drop down menus and links are not displaying on the screen correctly when I click on them. The forum one does it at random and sometimes posted links. I've attached a screenshot of what I get. It maybe firefox. I haven't tried other browsers.

Mach

[64Guitars]

How did you get to that page? From a bookmark perhaps?

The URL shown in the Firefox location bar is songcrafters.org/community/index.php?pretty;board=public_html;topic=community.0

The word "pretty" in the URL refers to an add-on package we had called "pretty urls". It hasn't worked in years, so I recently removed all the code for it. It's possible that I missed part of the code and it's causing this problem. Or I may have introduced a bug. I've noticed a related bug that I need to fix - some URLs on the site end up with ".html" on the end and they shouldn't. But I haven't seen any URLs of the type in the location bar of your screenshot, so I think the most likely explanation is that you have some old code in your browser's cache which still has "pretty url" references in it. Try clearing your browser's cache and see if the problem goes away. Another possibility is that you got to that link via a bookmark in your browser which is no longer valid. Check any bookmarks you have to Songcrafters and make sure they don't have the word "pretty" in them and they don't reference boards and topics by name. Boards and topics should always be numbers.

There are some weird bugs though, related to my removal of the pretty url package. For example, I noticed URLs like...

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php/topic,27205.0.html

which should actually look like this:

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?board=8.0;topic=27205.0

So there's still something leftover from the "pretty url" code that's messing up our URLs. It will probably be weeks before I've finally sorted that out, but I'll keep trying whenever I have a bit of time to look into it.

Thanks for reporting the problem and for the screenshot.

[Mach]

How did you get to that page? From a bookmark perhaps?

The URL shown in the Firefox location bar is songcrafters.org/community/index.php?pretty;board=public_html;topic=community.0


Thanks for reporting the problem and for the screenshot.

No bookmark, it's when I click on the drop down FORUM up top and any of it's sub-categories. It also did it a few times on the Home drop down. I clicked on a link in a thread and it also took me to that same screenshot. Sometimes it has the "pretty" in the link...it's random. It is displaying ok right now.

No problem 64, I hope you can sort it out.

Mach

[Mach]

Hey 64 I thought about what you mentioned about a bookmark so I edited the bookmark in my bookmarks menu and I am still getting this>>  https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?pretty;board=public_html;topic=community.0

It was happening at random at first. Now it does it every time I click on the Forum banner and subs and also on
Songcrafters.org

I'm not sure what is happening. Just letting you know.

Mach

[64Guitars]

Okay. Thanks for letting me know. I'm still not seeing URLs containing "pretty" but I am seeing weird URLs with ".html" where it shouldn't be and a forward slash where there should be a question mark, etc. I'm surprised that they work but they seem to. Not sure what's causing it.

[Mach]

Okay. Thanks for letting me know. I'm still not seeing URLs containing "pretty" but I am seeing weird URLs with ".html" where it shouldn't be and a forward slash where there should be a question mark, etc. I'm surprised that they work but they seem to. Not sure what's causing it.

I'm not getting the "pretty" URL anymore.
Whatever you did it's gone.
Great work 64G.

Mach

[64Guitars]

Turns out that it wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The SMF software that the forums run on has an option for "queryless urls" which was turned on. I guess when the pretty urls add-on was enabled, it was over-riding the the queryless urls feature. But when I removed the pretty urls add-on, the queryless urls feature was able to work the way it was intended. That is, it modified the query part of the url ("?board=8.0", for example) by changing the "?" to a "/" and the "=" to a "," then adding ".html" to it. The idea is that it's supposed to improve search engine optimisation. But I hated the look of it so I turned it off. I didn't see anything that specifically added the word "pretty" to the url but I guess that was part of the queryless urls feature too.