How do you find old-style links to old forum posts?

[DaveX]

How do you find a post like:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,85335.45.html

Consider this post that links to it:

Detecting "Physical" Resistance from Stepper Motor:

Detecting "Physical" Resistance from Stepper Motor

It feels very similar to a CD-ROM tray when you test it. PeterH you're mistaken, it does exactly that with the specific hardware I mention in the link. The code is on Gist, the discussion here:

Since the earlier round of user deletion and anonymization, you can't look it up by poster, and since some old forum changes seem to have broken links, you can't just click on it.

[sterretje]

Report it here and the admin will try to fix it. See e.g. Old url markup not migrated to new forum

[DaveX]

Thanks.

Do I need to do more of a report than what I've done in this thread?

[sterretje]

I think that it's sufficient.

[pert]

Hi @DaveX. I have fixed the broken link in that post.

In case anyone is interested in how to translate links that are broken due to using URLs with this old old format, I'll provide instructions:

The format used by these URLs is:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,<old topic ID>.<old post #>.html

We might expect that we can do a simple manual translation, for example:

Old URL:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,85335.45.html

New URL:

http://forum.arduino.cc/t/85335/45

But unfortunately the topic IDs have changed, so that doesn't work.

The web team set up a topic URL redirect system when the forum was migrated from the previous SMF forum framework to the current Discourse framework and the IDs changed. However, those redirects only work for the old URL format (http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic=<old topic ID>.<post #>.html) that was in use at the time of the migration. The URL format we see here is from an even older era of the forum, and is not covered by the redirect system. Fortunately the topic IDs are the same between the old old URL format and the old URL format, so we only need to manually translate the old old URL format to the old URL format, then use the redirect system to get the new URL:

1. Change the arduino.cc/forum component of the URL to forum.arduino.cc
2. Change the , to =
3. Open the URL in the browser.
   The page will automatically redirect to the current URL for the topic in the Discourse format.
4. Append /<old post # + 1> to the URL obtained by the previous step.
   The post number is incremented to translate from the 0-indexed SMF post number system to the 1-indexed Discourse system.

So we start from this old old format URL:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,85335.45.html

manually convert it to the old format URL:

http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic=85335.45.html

Then use the redirect system to get the new URL for the topic:

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/28byj-48-5-volt-stepper/83653

Finally, manually add the post # to the URL (the redirect system does not handle the post #):

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/28byj-48-5-volt-stepper/83653/46

[pert]

@sterretje

See e.g. Old url markup not migrated to new forum

Note that the subject of Old url markup not migrated to new forum is a bug in the renderer that caused certain BBCode URL markup in posts from the previous forum to not be correctly rendered after the migration, so you see things like this in old posts:

Instead of the expected:

http://example.com

Whereas this topic is about links that are correctly rendered by the forum framework, but broken due to having a URL format used by the forum framework that was in place many years ago, for which the arduino.cc website maintainers have not provided a redirect system.

But both these topics share the same core concept, which is that old posts are valuable and the community doesn't like to see them suffer from bit rot. And my response to both is that I am happy to fix broken links as they are reported by the community (whereas unfortunately it is not feasible for me to fix the problem universally).