Permalinks were installed with recent board software changes, first mentioned in this About BAUT thread: Permalink? where their rationale is explained (more search engine friendly links). Some problems seem to have cropped up (see View First Unread) that aren't yet clearly understood, but I just discoverd another issue in this thread: Arrogance in scientific disciplines (sorry Paracelsus I know you'd just as soon see that thread go away)

As near as I can tell, there are now two posts links in the upper right hand corner of each post, with the "permalink" in parentheses. The format of the other one (Thread Post Count) seems to be PPPPPPP-postCCC.html, and the permalink one is TTTTT-aaaaaaaaa-MM.html#postPPPPPPP

I'm assuming that
PPPPPPP is the post number
CCC is the count of the post within the thread
TTTTT is the topic number
aaaaaaaaa is the name of the thread (with spaces changed to dashes, and puncuation and short words removed)
MM is the page number

An incredibly bizarre kludge, if I have that right. The Thread Post Count combines post number (which the software uses to find the thread) with count within the thread. The Permalink combines the topic number with its version of the topic name, followed by the the page number, and a named entry index using the post number.

The bouncing back and forth between various pointers doesn't seem to be the worst of it--the page number, as near as I can tell, depends upon each individual user's settings. My page 7 will not be the same as your page 7, if I've set up different page lengths in my profile. My permalink would seem to be different than your permalink, and if I gave you my permalink, it might not even point to the post, for you, if that post happened to be on a different page for you. I think.

I just tried changing my page length and a permalink broke. I had the default page length (I think is 30) and copied a permalink for the first article on a page 2; the name contained "2".

I changed my page length to 5 articles per page.

I tried to use the permalink I had copied and instead of pointing to the 31st article in the thread, it took me to the 6th article (the first on page 2). It dutifully went to page two and didn't find the #postPPPPPPP there.

This seems very bad. (Edit: I emailed Fraser, so he can get an early start on his bad day.)

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Let's have a nice example to test.

I have just copied a non-permalink to the 31st article in the thread (by my current posts-per-page setting the first article on page 2) of BAUT Banned Posters Log.

BAUT BANNED posters log
It's by ToSeek and contains "MikeT banned (for a week) for anti-religious rant formerly located here."

I will now change my posts-per-page settings a few times and capture different permalinks to what should be the same article (but predictably may not actually take you there).

5 posts per page:
BAUT BANNED posters log
10 posts per page:
BAUT BANNED posters log
20 posts per page:
BAUT BANNED posters log
30 posts per page:
BAUT BANNED posters log
40 posts per page:
BAUT BANNED posters log
They should all lead to the same article. They don't. (But, since those are all the possible choices for the setting, at least one of them will work for everyone.)

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This complaint to vBSEO, from another forum operator, sounds familiar:

Just installed vBSEO, users complaining about "first new post" links

vBSEO reply:
===

This one appears to be the page-numbers-in-permalink-URLs problem:

Permalink reliant on user settings

No on-point reply by vBSEO or notice of fix.

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