Will uninstall break links?

This may be an odd question, but if I should ever have to uninstall or turn off vBSEO, does that mean 100% of any links to an SEO'd URL will 404?

Yes. You can use .htaccess directives to direct the threads back to the old format though.

Thanks.

Would that be one directive, or thousands (one for each link?)

Just one for threads.

Redirects for Forum links and Member Profile links would also be possible, but only if your URL format includes the ForumID and UserID respectively.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

Yes. You can use .htaccess directives to direct the threads back to the old format though.

where can the documentation for that be found?

thanks

Exact rewrite rules to redirect SEOed links to old format depend on your URL formats.

I think that's understood. Hence I attached my vbseo_all.xml in the support ticket

I really think more documentation on this should be given. As with any good software or install product. A full uninstall being possible and well documented is a decent practice. This will help us users not to feel trapped after using vbseo may want to revert back for whatever reason. If uninstalling breaks our forums that really bad.

A TRUE uninstall reverts things to work exactly as they were? not so? Although this is not PC software that installs with a wizard, I like how cnet puts it:

"Stability. How well does the software run? Is it well engineered, and does it use minimal system resources? Does it install easily and uninstall completely?"

I hope this is taken as a good suggestion.

Yes, the uninstall does revert things back exactly as they were.

But, if your new links have been indexed by search engines, or saved by users, they will no longer work.

Old, standard vBulletin links will continue to work as usual.

Thanks for the fast response.

When I disable. All links posted in threads and posts, signatures etc by members are broken. Member profile posted in threads, signatures etc are broken. This was as a direct result of vbseo features and thus although the only php links are restore a proper solution for all the links posted should be created or if not simply and highly visable warning to users.

I'm stuck with vbseo because there would be simply just tooo many broken links withing forums. I don't care about google etc for now. Time would have sorted that.

Yes, as I said, any rewritten links will fail to work since you are no longer running the software that handles those new links.

As long as your URL formats include the ID number (thread id, forum id, user id, etc), a few simple .htaccess rules can be used to redirect those to the old vBulletin-style URLs.

For example, if using the default Showthread URL Format, it would be something like this:

Code:

RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([0-9]+)-.+.html$ /forums/showthread.php?t=$1 [L,R=301]

But as Oleg said, it will vary from site to site. And, the default URL formats don't include the Forum ID in forum URLs, nor the User ID in member profile URLs, so there would be no easy way to rewrite those to their old URLs.

"a few simple .htaccess rules can be used to redirect those to the old vBulletin-style URLs."That sounds very "simple" to document then. Do you have a link to any documentation on those rules. Httpd.ini in my case.

See my previous reply. I may have added the sample after you replied.