Case Sensitive URLS?! Madness.

gbrookshaw

I was about to unveil my new site then came across the case sensitive URL issue...

This is madness.

I've been fine with all the minor annoyances with the new design knowing that it will get better and better as the days go on but there seems to be a statement that URLs are now case sensitive! And it isn't going to change.

But this...this baffles me!

You have to remember that most of our users are casual users and they kind of panic/give up when something doesn't work first time...

Do you realise how many emails we're all going to get now about 'my link doesn't work anymore...'

Can you not see the issue?

It's OK to make bad decisions it's how you deal with correcting them that defines quality service...

There has got to be a solution? Surely?!

Thanks

mbonocore

gbrookshaw wrote: »

I was about to unveil my new site then came across the case sensitive URL issue...

This is madness.

I've been fine with all the minor annoyances with the new design knowing that it will get better and better as the days go on but there seems to be a statement that URLs are now case sensitive! And it isn't going to change.

But this...this baffles me!

You have to remember that most of our users are casual users and they kind of panic/give up when something doesn't work first time...

Do you realise how many emails we're all going to get now about 'my link doesn't work anymore...'

Can you not see the issue?

It's OK to make bad decisions it's how you deal with correcting them that defines quality service...

There has got to be a solution? Surely?!

Thanks

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your feedback. I understand your position, and this matter has been brought to the attention of the engineering team.

jhelms

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1893600&postcount=372

chortler

I did not expect this type of incompetence from SM
I just lost a client. Thank you very much. One wedding down the drain. Not to mention I look like a fool. EVERY custom domain I have ever made was done in lower case. EVERY link I have ever sent a client or potential client was in lower case. EVERY person who has bookmarked something on my site did it in lower case.

Did you even stop to think for one second how drastically you might be affecting us by this senseless change? One month a link works, now it does not.

I have no words to describe how angry I am right now. Now I need to write a letter to all my clients and try to tell them how to find their photos. I have hours and hours of work ahead of me. I am going to lose clients and money.

Just answer one question for me. When you made this change, did you even ask or wonder how this might affect your paying clients?

mbonocore

chortler wrote: »

I just lost a client. Thank you very much. One wedding down the drain. Not to mention I look like a fool. EVERY custom domain I have ever made was done in lower case. EVERY link I have ever sent a client or potential client was in lower case. EVERY person who has bookmarked something on my site did it in lower case.

Did you even stop to think for one second how drastically you might be affecting us by this senseless change? One month a link works, now it does not.

I have no words to describe how angry I am right now. Now I need to write a letter to all my clients and try to tell them how to find their photos. I have hours and hours of work ahead of me. I am going to lose clients and money.

Just answer one question for me. When you made this change, did you even ask or wonder how this might affect your paying clients?

I sincerely apologize for the issue you experienced. One suggestion would be to make a custom 404 that display your folders such as "Events" and "Weddings". A user could then navigate to their event in a click or two. I know it is not the solution you are looking for, but it has worked well for some customers.

mbellot

chortler wrote: »

Just answer one question for me. When you made this change, did you even ask or wonder how this might affect your paying clients?

Nope.

They just wanted to be sure their links would continue to work, and have said so on several occasions.

starrynight

Does this mean that our old links will no longer work if they are lower case?

phaserbeam

starrynight wrote: »

Does this mean that our old links will no longer work if they are lower case?

Yes... that's the problem. xxxx.smugmug.com/wedding will create a 404-error, xxxx.smugmug.com/Wedding will work. You can customize your 404-page by going to xxxx.smugmug.com/404 and select "Customize" and as mentioned add a extra menu or quicklinks to the new/correct URLs. Not very comfortable but may work.

New Galleries always get a upper case 1st letter.

macromeister

Is it not possible to set up sub-domains in dgrin so that you can map one url to another? In this case the old lower-case url to the new mixed-case?

I changed my website name last year and now have a permanent forwarding to the new name for people who have the old URL address. The viewer doesn't even know about it.

chrisjohnson

Baldy outlined a solution that would fix 100% of my problems with this on August 9th. Pity it is not yet implemented.

Michael - I took your advice on the 404 page and trust this mitigates my issues. Not sure it works for someone with a direct link to an unlisted or private gallery.

kygarden

Good to know about being able to edit the 404 page per site. I didn't realize that, so I just updated mine, just in case :-) http://www.openbloom.com/404

phaserbeam

kygarden wrote: »

Good to know about being able to edit the 404 page per site.

Have a look here.

jfriend

macromeister wrote: »

Is it not possible to set up sub-domains in dgrin so that you can map one url to another? In this case the old lower-case url to the new mixed-case?

I changed my website name last year and now have a permanent forwarding to the new name for people who have the old URL address. The viewer doesn't even know about it.

That can work for domains, but not for parts of the path which is what this issue is about.

dsturnerville

mbonocore wrote: »

I sincerely apologize for the issue you experienced. One suggestion would be to make a custom 404 that display your folders such as "Events" and "Weddings". A user could then navigate to their event in a click or two. I know it is not the solution you are looking for, but it has worked well for some customers.

When can we expect a fix for this?

mbellot

dsturnerville wrote: »

When can we expect a fix for this?

Read his response...

They are only offering work-arounds. SM doesn't consider this a bug or broken, AFAIK they have no intention of changing (fixing) it.

rainforest1155

Actually, we have tweaked things on our end and in most cases, links should also work with the lower case version. For example, take the Heroes gallery. It also comes up when you access it with an (almost) all lower case url.

However, we still highly recommend that you still use and give out the proper links as they're provided by the system, meaning with a capital first letter. All lower case links are still reserved for SmugMug system pages and we may add new features in the future that may use a folder or page name you've already set up on your site. A current example would be the keyword page that's present on each New SmugMug account. So if you have a custom page named Keyword, you and your visitors would not be able to access it via:
yoursite.smugmug.com/keyword
It would bring up instead the SmugMug keyword page.

EDIT: I realize that the Heroes gallery wasn't the best example as it includes a user added capital letter (the M from the SmugMug folder). The system will only ignore case for the first (enforced) capital letter. Any additional upper case letters you add yourself, will have to be entered exactly as specified by you as the account owner.

pekr

I am doing IT and marketing related stuff for almost 20 years. Sorry, but using capital letters in URL is so arcane, that it is simply incompetent. Do you want to put something like mydomain.com/Gallery on your printed material, along with fb, twitter, web, email, all being lowercase? It will look like crap anyway. Even Microsoft got it right - allowing both forms to be used, yet leading to one single content. You should really stop pushing unix heritage onto ppl's burdens, ppl don't care, ppl just want the solution to work. System implementation details should be hidden from ppl when possible. Thanks god, that at least the first letter works in dual mode, but as we have to post URLs for unlisted galleries too, capital letters are used there anyway.

I am starting to think, that the design path you chose, was intentional, which is even worse. Capital letters in urls should be imo all but prohibited by law and unix folks should stop to live in their 60ties. Any claims about possible future design decisions being made upon lowercase pages being reserved by SM for the internal system purposes just mean that the system design is not done correctly, sorry ....

mbellot

rainforest1155 wrote: »

Actually, we have tweaked things on our end and in most cases, links should also work with the lower case version.

Not good enough.

99.9999% of the internet is case insensitive, making a conscious decision to ignore that fact when you are serving up millions (billions?) of web pages is just plain stupid.

If I enter www.smugmug.com or WWW.SMUGMUG.COM or Www.SmugMug.Com or any other combination of upper and lower case the DNS servers are smart enough to know they all go to the same place.

EDIT: even the forum software is smart enough to convert all of those links to complete lower case.

mbellot

pekr wrote: »

I am starting to think, that the design path you chose, was intentional, which is even worse.

It was, and they have openly admitted it was done so as to not break any of their legacy urls that are out in the wild.

Andy

Hm. You can see a photo of me contemplating this if you go here, note the url is all lowercase......

http://moonriverphotography.com/lowercase/small-letters/n-twvsg

phaserbeam

Andy wrote: »

Hm. You can see a photo of me contemplating this if you go here, note the url is all lowercase......

There seem to be some work in progress... but it doesn't always work.

Example:
Works: http://phaserbeam.smugmug.com/WilhelmaZoo (Thats how i created the URL)
Doesn't work: http://phaserbeam.smugmug.com/Wilhelmazoo
Doesn't work: http://phaserbeam.smugmug.com/wilhelmazoo
Works: http://phaserbeam.smugmug.com/wilhelmaZoo
Doesn't work: http://phaserbeam.smugmug.com/WILHELMAZOO

So only the first letter is being checked, URLS are still case sensitive but a redirection may work if only the first letter of the site is upper case and the rest is lower case.

rainforest1155

phaserbeam wrote: »

There seem to be some work in progress... but it doesn't always work.
So only the first letter is being checked, URLS are still case sensitive but a redirection may work if only the first letter of the site is upper case and the rest is lower case.

As I mentioned before, if you manually add in upper case letters, those will be required. Our tweak only applies to the first letter of a folder, gallery or page where you cannot enter a lower case letter as these are reserved for system pages.

phaserbeam

rainforest1155 wrote: »

As I mentioned before, if you manually add in upper case letters, those will be required.

I would never add upper case letters to URLs... this is the default behavior of SM when creating a new gallery. The gallery name is copied to the URL field respecting upper/lower case as given in the gallery name.

Even if i would never add upper case letters myself SM did that by default so with lots of new galleries created in the past months this is common practice if the user does not manually correct the URL and has multiple words in the gallery name with upper case letters. Maybe SM should change that behavior.

It should be clear that even if the user only specifies lower-case URLs the URLs are still case sensitive.

I don't link my pages to external sites or give away gallery links, so i'm not affected by that.