As for the "Linking to an asylum page that's been archived" problem. I've noticed that this happens throughout the asylum a lot as well. Maybe we could alter the Asylum board to write in a HTML re-direct when it archives anything to try and keep the links working all-round.
Although I can see another problem here as well. What if someone links a page in the FAQ then it gets removed from the Asylum after a certain period of time, ie - not archived?. I think the biggest problems at the moment are maintaining integrity between the two structures. Maybe we need to force the migration of the Asylum to a PHP solution sooner? Maybe there are other ways to work around this for the time being.
So, I'm thinking, maybe there's a way to create a mechanism within the FAQ for linking to posts. The FAQ can replace the link, not with an actual link to the post, but a link to a php thingy to deal with it. Something like, if I type
[asylum15.63]
it will link to forum 15, thread #63. Except that it won't actually link there, it will link to a php thingy, which will check to see if there *exists* a thread 63 in forum 15. If there does, it will forward you there. But, if there does not, it could search the archives for any html file ending in "-15-000063.html". If it finds one, it will both (a) forward the user there, while (b) deleting the old link to itself and replacing it with a hard link to the archived topic.
OK, so it's a little screwy, and may be hard to implement. But it might make things easier; if we don't do something about it, I forsee many broken links which no one will have the ambition to fix.
It might be easier to implement it like this: every time a thread is archived, it can store information about the archival in some text file, saying something like "thread 63 in forum 15 has been archived to this url: ...", then the php script i mentioned could use that text file rather than searching the archives for the topic.
OK. Just some ideas.
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In the same vein, here is one more idea:
.htaccess and mod_rewrite could be used to transparently search for links to "dead" topics.
Of course, all this depends on the release of the new Asylum, but
I feel mod_rewrite would allow for an easy workaround:
