Issue: VW3 redirect doesnt work if parameters are involved

Most of the parameters listed are invalid or non-canonical. For example, the following are simply not valid:
&amp_do=comments
&amp_amp_amp_do=comments&langid=3

&langid=3 does nothing in XenForo.
&redirect=no is only visible to logged-in users in VW3 anyway.

No matter what the parameters are, the redirect scripts are only designed to point to the main tab of a wiki page.

title=Island:177466

This URL will not work if that Anonymous page no longer exists. On your old site, look for showthread.php?t=177466
It was either deleted before import or after import. There is an edge case of Island URLs that would not have been imported correctly:
- In VW3, you created a redirect in an Island-type forum.
Looking at the code, I think Island redirects would be imported as synonyms with Prefix = [No Prefix] and Title = [threadid], which is a bug. Island redirects should be imported with the Island prefix merged to its title; that is, Prefix = [No Prefix] and Title = Island:[threadid]. If this happened, it should be easy to find in Special:ListRedirects, because the number titles would be first in the list. You could then modify the affected synonyms and rename them so that "Island:" appears at the beginning of the number-title.

You did not specify what types of crawl errors each are. In many cases, a "403" is good. It means that non-public content is not being shown to guests.

Since this is due to a bot crawling the site and actually finding these links, you should pay attention to where the bot found them and correct the invalid links. You can easily have "404" crawl errors on your site if your users post made-up links or if you later delete the content that they linked to. This is all expected behavior.

If any crawl errors are due to "500", this is a different problem, such as a PHP or MySQL error at the link, and is probably not due to a flaw in the redirect script.

Its quite weird. It concerns 404 errors. The links are on the wiki page itself. When I go to the wiki page as a guest there indeed is a comments tab which when clicked will lead to ?do=comments
This link works perfectly.
However when in GWT the link is listed there results in a 404. I compared the links and they are the same.

I am not sure if the crawl date is given, but for most of these (if a user didn't post the link manually), the crawl date would have been during VaultWiki 3 time, so the 404 would have occurred while VaultWiki 3 was still being used. It is possible that some of these URLs were incorrectly giving 404s under VaultWiki 3, so bugs in VaultWiki 3. But if you cannot find the links on the VaultWiki 4 pages or the ones you find are not giving 404s now when you check as guest, then there's not much else you can do.

All crawl data is from last August and September.
However, the originating links are all showwiki.php URLs. So Google is trying to find links that existed on VW3.

I see it now!
The issue is that VW3 was using &do=comments and VW4 is using ?do=comments
It seems to me that the VW redirection script should redirect these &do=comments to ?do=comments
If anything after that would be stripped, then that would also resolve quite various of the other redirection issues.

Urls like this do not get redirected correctly:
https://my-forum.com/forum/showwiki....&pagenumbe r=1
https://my-forum.com/forum/showwiki....le&redirect=no
&redirect=no may only be visible to logged in users, but the URL is posted all over my site by logged in users in the last 10 years. Google spiders this and marks it as dead links.

&langid=3 is vbulletin 3 code and its xenforo equivalent is https://www.my-forum.com/misc/langua...y-forum.com%2F
The redirect is whatever the url the user is on. But I don't think that matters. Would it be possible to have the redirection script strip this from the url and then redirect: &langid=3
So that :
https://my-forum.com/forum/showwiki....le&redirect=no
becomes:
https://my-forum.com/fwiki/WikiTitle

After reviewing your site, it looks like you were not even using the redirect scripts. The redirecting that occurred was not consistent with the way the redirect script is designed. This is probably because you have custom rules in your root .htaccess file which appear to bypass the script (forwarding /forum/showwiki.php directly to the XenForo wiki path, rather than to the redirect script). It seems that a lot of these issues would be caused by your custom .htaccess rules. Commenting them out of your .htaccess appears to have the desired redirect effect, because the redirect script is used, which strips the undesired parameters, as you expect.

For some reason there are a mass of redirections from:
/forum/showwiki.php?title=X (VW3)
to:
/wiki/showwiki.php?title=X (VW4)
Which obviously doesn't work.

Please try to reproduce. If you can reproduce, report the URL that does this.

The behavior described sounds like what would happen in VW3 days if .htaccess was not setup correctly, or sometimes if URLs needed to be rebuilt.
/forum/showwiki.php?title=X would redirect to /forum/showwiki.php?title=showwiki.php?title=showwiki.php?title= ...

Redirecting the second form to VW4 using your .htaccess rule which I removed the other day would have resulted in a URL like /wiki/showwiki.php?title=showwiki.php?title=...

Fixed in the next release:
- redirects-that-are-islands being imported with the incorrect title
- redirect scripts redirecting do=comments to the main tab
- VW4-import redirect scripts not redirecting ID-based URLs to the new IDs (requires a new admin setting to choose which import should be redirected)

Marking this as Fixed. These were the only problems I found regarding the redirect scripts not redirecting to the expected place when these parameters are used. Other parameters are correctly stripped from the URL when redirecting, and most of your errors above were related to invalid URLs for which the expected behavior is not to work, or due to conflicting .htaccess rules which did not allow the redirect scripts to do their job.

Thanks a lot Ted!
Is the next release near or is it possible to somehow resolve the crawl errors on my site now?

I don't believe any of the crawl errors you experienced are related to the fixes I've made:
- Your source wiki from the import was not VW4
- For your VW3 source, you had no redirects that were in island forums (or you have deleted those VW4 synonyms already). If you had non-Island redirects that pointed to Island pages, this was also broken, but those redirects must be repaired manually (see Special:BrokenRedirects).
- The do=comments change does not affect any crawl errors; either way the crawler would have received a 200 OK from the server. The difference is that the redirect target for VW3 do=comments URLs is closer to the expected location.

However, these fixes are the only issues I was able to find in the redirect scripts, which may or may not have resulted in crawl errors.

Your issues appear to be with malformed links, old URLs that were already broken while you were still using VW3 (and thus are no longer relevant), site configuration issues (such as your .htaccess bypassing the redirect script entirely), and stale browser cache.

I fixed the .htaccess issue on your site, but you must deal with other crawl errors on a case-by-case basis. Pay attention to the referer of the crawl error; if a user posted a link that doesn't work, you should edit their post to fix or remove the link. I recommend ignoring any errors that occurred more than 3 or 4 months ago, as they are probably not relevant to anything happening on your site nowadays.

/wiki/Book:Haeufig_gestellte_Fragen
does not redirect to the VW4 url:
/wiki/Book:Häufig_gestellte_Fragen
This is caused by the special character in the title.

Regarding Island pages. Its quite weird. Google found links to this: /forum/showwiki.php?title=Island:238351
Here: /forum/showwiki.php?title=Special:Islandpages&limit=500&offset=2 0
Its not a matter of user error.

All do=comments redirects work now which is awesome.

For VW3 sources that did not use UTF-8 in the forum languages, your special character non-translation issue was an oversight in the importer, which will need to be fixed for future imports. The importer did not consider that VW3 used a completely different set of URL encoding rules in that case and that synonyms might be necessary. However, it should be simple enough to manually recreate these alternate versions as synonyms if you notice crawl errors due to this.

It is possible that title=Island:238351 was already a dead link when you were using VW3. If that's the case, then it is expected that it would not work in VW4. It would be user error that the link still exists (if it even does). In VW4, the title=Island:238351 would be treated as a synonym of the VW4 anonymous page, but you don't have any synonyms that look like this on Special:ListRedirects?starting=I. This is why I said the Island issue was not relevant to you. My thinking is that you either did not have these anymore at the time of the import, or you deleted it at some point when you did cleanup (I recall you removed an entire Wiki Redirects forum). You can always recreate it manually.