Thread:User talk:Dantman/Manual:Short URL/reply

Sorry.

That page linked to contains bad advice. Ancient misinformation from people who don't understand how rewrites or MediaWikis' url routing works which I am trying to eliminate from the wiki and replace with actual good advice.

The most particular problem there is the use of ?title=$1 inside the url. That is absolutely unnecessary. MediaWiki extracts the article from the url itself, there is no point to specifying a title. That kind of rewrite rule originates from someone who doesn't understand that fact. To top it off not only is it unnecessary but it actually causes bugs. Apache's query rewriting capabilities are broken. It does not properly escape things. As a result when you do a rewrite like that instead of letting MediaWiki do the parsing itself thanks to Apache's broken rewrites characters such as + and & inside of your page titles become completely broken.