It appears that the KDE forums at some point have broken all thread links and for some reason, Google is not realizing it. As a consequence, the KDE forums are not "cool".

The search term "kdenlive export frames" without quotes gives on Google a link to the forum as a top result:

https://www.google.de/search?q=kdenlive+export+frames

The link is http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/export-vi ... e-sequence and leads to viewforum.php?f=26 ... e-sequence however, when I visit this link, either logged in or out, I only see the index page.

On duckduckgo, the search term "kdenlive export video to image sequence" does not find viewtopic.php?f=272&t=116033 , while google does find both the correct and the broken old link. What is noticeable is that the old link contains "Kdenlive" in the (html) title. This might mean that having the title of the subforum (which contains the thread) in the html title of a thread page, would allow users to better find what they are looking for.

The fact that the false results are shown on Google, might be solvable by having a 404 page.

Putting "Export video to image sequence" without quotes into forum search does not give instant results. Putting the string into quotes does however.

I assume this is unlikely but: If there is a Google user bot on these forums, it might receive different results from what non-logged in or normal users get.

There are further bugs on the KDE forums:
1. On search.php, the string "export-video-image-sequence" without quotes gets converted into "export -video -image -sequence" without quotes.
2. Any string in quotes gets removed from the search text input on the results page. For example '"test" test"' becomes ' test' (single quotes not used).

A dash does not mean exclusion if there is a non-whitespace character in front of it and search terms should stay in search text input fields on the search results page even with quotes.

There seems to be no way to go from viewtopic.php?f=262&t=115963 into the parent subforum. Allowing this via a link that contains the subforum title (which in this case would contain the string "Kdenlive") would enhance the user experience and might also allow search engines to see a connection to "Kdenlive". I missed the bottom bar which contains "Board index" and links to all parent subforums. This indicates that "Kdenlive" really should be in the html title. In addition, according to my experience often the thread navigation process is
1. find link to thread,
2. go to thread,
3. realize by reading the first message that the thread is irrelevant to you,
4. visit the thread's parent subforum to find something relevant to you.
and it is uncommon that the link to the parent subforum is not right above the thread title text.

I assume that if it was easy to make old links redirect to new ones, you would have done so already. If we can achieve that old links are forgotten by search engines (by making false links be 404 pages?) and current links are easy to index (by making the related software clear in html head and body), this should solve the problem.

Fixing some of these issues might require editing the used phpBB style, which I can help with based on my experience with freegamedev.net. Perhaps other issues (search input behavior) can be fixed by updating the style, which might have been on hold because nobody is available to upgrade it, which is something I could help with as well. Does anybody know whether it's open source and where to access it?

This link breakage is not due to us i'm afraid. The Kdenlive forum was previously hosted on kdenlive.org, and has since been migrated to forum.kde.org. Unfortunately while the content was migrated, we don't have a map between the old URL scheme and the form the new URLs would need to take i'm afraid - so we can't fix those.

In regards to the search for "Export video to image sequence" - this is because the forum search engine looks in both the post/topic title and the post content by default. If you are looking to do a title search only, then you need to select the appropriate "Search within" option.

While bots are treated differently by the forum software, this does not cover content - and only relates to the visibility of features which aren't of use to bots. Content itself is not affected.

In regards to the search queries - I can confirm there does appear to be automatic splitting taking place for a single query of export-video-image-sequence (without quotes). Placing it within quotes however does execute the desired query. I've no idea why this behaviour is taking place unfortunately - however it is likely intended (to correct input errors for instance). I can confirm issue #2, however this is likely intended - the board software is de-duplicating your search terms.

In terms of the theme, I do know that parts of it are available in the Git repository located at git://anongit.kde.org/websites/neverland, however sayakb will need to comment on the precise details of our setup i'm afraid.

Thanks for all the information!

bcooksley wrote:This link breakage is not due to us i'm afraid. The Kdenlive forum was previously hosted on kdenlive.org, and has since been migrated to forum.kde.org. Unfortunately while the content was migrated, we don't have a map between the old URL scheme and the form the new URLs would need to take i'm afraid - so we can't fix those.

It looks like the old forums are back read-only. Unfortunately with no notification informing of the new forum.

Is it known, whether it would be possible to match kdenlive/kdeforums website databases (probably over the thread titles), so that the old forum can redirect or link with a visible disclaimer saying something like: "This forum is archived, please use the new one at [LINK TO ACTIVE THREAD]"?

bcooksley wrote:In regards to the search queries - I can confirm there does appear to be automatic splitting taking place for a single query of export-video-image-sequence (without quotes). Placing it within quotes however does execute the desired query. I've no idea why this behaviour is taking place unfortunately - however it is likely intended (to correct input errors for instance).

You are correct. I realize now that this appears to be a phpBB feature:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/search. ... mit=Search

bcooksley wrote:I can confirm issue #2, however this is likely intended - the board software is de-duplicating your search terms.

This is for the top right search box only.
Bad example. Here's a better one:

foo "bar"

turns into

foo

search.php?keywords=foo+%22bar%22

Strangely also:

"foo" bar

turns into nothing
search.php?keywords=%22foo%22+bar

I can't reproduce this on https://www.phpbb.com/community/search.php?keywords="foo"+bar though, as there seems to be no persistent search box on the results page. I will report a bug if it doesn't exist yet (I only now saw the forums are not for bug reports).

EDIT: submitted at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342324

I'm afraid I can't comment on the matching process as I wasn't involved with the merge of the Kdenlive forum into this forum.
Theoretically it would be possible to put redirects in place though if the thread numbers could be matched.

If the phpbb.com forums are also affected by the search issue, I would suggest filing a bug report with them - as they're the ones most able to fix the issue.