Permalinks, IDs, and Potential Conflicts
By Josh Lewis on Tuesday, 09 December 2014
Posted in General Issues
Replies 3
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Currently it's possible to link to a profile in two ways:
site/profile/username
site/profile/id

Having the second method is potentially problematic. If a user for example changes their permalink to a number, suddenly there is a serious possibility of their user permalink being the same as a user id. View this profile: http://www.test.alpineascent.com/63
Using my login details, use the stacked account to change the permalink to a non number. Suddenly you will see that link to to a different profile. I admit that because the permalink has precedence, the issue is minor. However I could see this creating potential conflicts which it's always good to create less issues for you guys to deal with.

The question arises, is the structure site/profile/id required? I'm also trying to be conscience of Google potentially treating it as a double record which could lower SEO. On the flip side I suppose it might only be viewable when you actually query it via the id in the url. Hence making it possible that the separate id page might be hidden from search engines?
Hello Josh,

Sorry for the late reply. We have discussed about this topic with our developers and this will be revisited in ES 1.4 which we already added new Profile URL feature in our repo. Thanks for the heads up by the way. Good explanation.
Nik Faris
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Tuesday, 09 December 2014 19:20
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This issue still remains in ES 1.4 beta 1 as seen here:
http://test.peakbeta.com/profile/62
Theoretically this link should not work. Google will cache this as a duplicate URL (bad for SEO) and has some other negative implications if the url works.

Normally I would put this in the issues section, however I figured it would be easier to give a reminder of a conversation that has had some consideration already.
Josh Lewis
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Friday, 04 September 2015 17:22
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Hey Josh,

Could you please post this on our issue tracker page and we'll look into this. I think as long as there are no links generated as /62 , it is perfectly fine as Google won't be able to find such links. Nevertheless I think the best way to implement / fix duplicate urls is via the canonical tag
Mark
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Saturday, 05 September 2015 02:02
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