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URLs with cache numbers no longer work?


Seth!

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Back in the good old days, cache page URLs looked like this:

 

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=8480

 

This link survived many versions of the web site but I discovered today that these links no longer work. I have created MANY web pages with HUNDREDS of links that use this format. Can the site be fixed so that these links still point to the cache page?

 

Perhaps this was a temporary outage, but I have a feeling that it is not. Thanks.

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Both of those are fine suggestions but would involve changing a lot of links on a lot of pages. It seems like it would be a simple enough matter to tell the server to recognize the original format as well as any versions since then.

 

One nice thing about the old URL is that you could readily see that geocache 9000 was the 9,000th geocache posted on the site.

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Isn't this a problem you should be complaining to Microsoft about?

 

The users are not Microsoft's customer in this case. Telling the users to go bug Microsoft isn't productive. Neither the users nor Microsoft generated those links initially and they don't administer the software that responds to them. If you would like to debate this, try to file a problem report with Microsoft that a link to your favorite website is broken.

 

If Groundspeak noticed the flurry of error messages in their logs (and I have no idea if they did) they'd have noticed the failing incoming traffic in their error logs even if the change in naming made it through the regression tests.

 

In Apache (which this site doesn't use) the solution to allow both forms to resolve would be as simple as adding "redirect permanent /seek/cache_details.asp http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx" to the .htaccess file. That'd preserve all the links that used the old form as well as allowing the new form at a cost of under 30 seconds.

 

Perhaps there's a similarly simple way to change URL names in IIS if you happened to rewrite a page - intentionally or not. Or you can expect change the whole internet to adapt to your new scheme scheme. Neither would be terribly shocking to me.

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So did the old way to link to a profile using the sequential number you are assigned as you signed up. I figured it was part of the ASP.NET Version 2.0 thing. I don't know though, just guessing.

The pages in question aren't user profiles; they're individual cache pages. (Not that this changes anything.) The sequential numbers in question are the next available GC at the time of submission that is assigned by Groundspeak. The links are built by Groundspeak and serviced by Groundspeak. The difference is the presence or absence of the "x" in the URL; the number doesn't factor in.

 

I'm not guessing. I'm saying that if it was important to the house, it'd be trivial to keep working. URLs change on the web all the time. You want to avoid it if you can, but web servers and browsers have elaborate "page moved" schemes for them to cope when it happens. Server redirects are common. Webmasters scan error logs, pick the most common ones, and issue redirects all the time. It's the way that links and search engine mojo keeps running in the face of change.

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Both of those are fine suggestions but would involve changing a lot of links on a lot of pages. It seems like it would be a simple enough matter to tell the server to recognize the original format as well as any versions since then.

 

There are many simple utilities you can use to do find/replace bulk changes easily to your links. It's pretty unlikely Groundspeak will change anything.

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Perhaps there's a similarly simple way to change URL names in IIS if you happened to rewrite a page - intentionally or not.

Yes, it is fairly simple, of course you have to use a gui to do it instead of editing a plain text file. I did it several times on the company website before we changed to apache. Then I updated the .htaccess file to redirect the URL's with asp in them to the new php pages that replaced them. So the oldest version of the URL still works.
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....so update your links. Even primitive word processors can do a decent search and replace.

 

It happens. I am not sure why Groundspeak should take a lot of responsibility for links created on privately owned pages. Things change constantly. Updating links to outside sites is an importan part of web design and maintenance.

Edited by StarBrand
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I am not sure why Groundspeak should take a lot of responsibility for links created on privately owned pages.

 

They should take resposibility because they're their links. It's in their best interest to go out of their way to ensure that old links continue to work. It certainly isn't the end of the world if they don't but I for one think it's worth a few minutes of their time to set it up.

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The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) while acknowledging that the web site owner can do anything they want, they recommend that owner make sure that URL’s continue to run.

from http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.

 

When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.

……

It is the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years.

 

So TPTB have the right to change URL’s but it would have been nice if they had taken W3C’s recommendation.

 

Note the article talks about URI (uniform resource identifier) instead of URL (uniform resource locator). That is because the URL include how to get something i.e. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/ is an URL, and www.geocaching.com/seek/ is an URI.

 

Oops, I just saw that OpinioNate has already committed to doing it.

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