Old links in posts not working

I don’t think this has been mentioned before but there’s a problem viewing old forum links, in posts, on the new software eg.

http://www.weather-watch.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2187&highlight=solar+sensor+jar
or
http://www.weather-watch.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2419&highlight=solar+sensor+jar

produce -

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not query config information

DEBUG MODE

SQL Error : 1146 Table ‘weather_watch_com.phpbb_config’ doesn’t exist

SELECT * FROM phpbb_config

Line : 206
File : /home/weather-watch.com/public_html/phpBB2/common.php

which makes it difficult to follow helpful links in previous posts! Perhaps needs a global update of the old URL links in posts?

Julian

You’re the first to spot this. I’ve deleted the old phpBB2 data now, so that’s why the error occurs. I don’t think I can fix the highlight bits, but I should be able to fix most of the links. It’s a manual job though, so not a quick fix. For example…

http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=2187.0
or
http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=2419.0

Not too familiar with mysql but most databases have a ‘replace’ command so you could run a query like

UPDATE table
SET Forumtext = REPLACE (Forumtext, ‘http://www.weather-watch.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=’, ‘http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/index.php?topic=’)

Might want to test it first :slight_smile:

Julian

MySQL can do that and I did considered it, but there are quite a few variations on the simple ‘http://www.weather-watch.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=’, e.g. adding highlight= on the end of the URL, and these aren’t SMF compatible. I don’t want to mess things up even more by doing an auto-conversion! There aren’t that too many references to change manually, so it shouldn’t take too long.

I recently moved some databases from an old method to a new method. The sites had thousands of search engine hits looking for the old articles.

I generated a database that contained the old topic number and the new topic number and wrote a 404 error redirect script that catches those types of calls and redirects them to the new format.

I can provide you with the the 404 error code that I used (it is in php) if you want.

All you really have to look for is the topic number, you can ignore the other possible entries.

Thanks for the offer, but there are only about 20-30 to change and I think I did 5 or 6 of those in 5 minutes this morning.