Forum Discussion

JoshKemp-ab5d4f's avatar
JoshKemp-ab5d4f
Community Member
3 months ago

Dead URLs / improper redirects

If you search for a given issue on Google (or other search engines), there are a ton of deadlinks from Articulate Community. 

E.g., for Storyline, I wanted to see if there was a way to move an object to an exact position (as opposed to moving it on a line.) So I searched "storyline trigger move object to exact position" on Google.

The first result says: "Move object to a specific position - E-Learning Heroes" with the URL https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/move-object-to-a-specific-position

But if I go to that URL, it redirects me to https://community.articulate.com/

Fortunately, I can view this result on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210422105541/https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/move-object-to-a-specific-position

However, that's not always possible -- the second result for the search on Google ( https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/move-an-object-to-the-current-position-of-another-object  ) wasn't saved on archive.org. And in any case, these results will eventually stop appearing in search results once Google realizes all those old URLs redirect.  

Ideally Articulate would fix these broken URLs and redirect them to the proper page. Until that's done though, how should I manually modify the URL to view that page?

There was a lot of really good info in these old community posts that made it easier to figure out how to do more complex things in Storyline, as well as some unintuitive but convenient trigger setups, and some handy custom JavaScript.

  • I don't think there is a way to manually modify an old URL so it will work on this new site, because the new URLs have a number appended at the end.

    However, on both sites, the URLs contain the title of the discussion (typically with a hyphen between words). So try this:

    • Copy the title part of the old URL.
    • Search on that "term"on the new site.

     

    The search results should include the new page for that post. 

    Caveat: If a discussion on the old site didn't have any activity for the last 3 years, it wasn't transferred to the new site. In other words, those are gone for good.