Forum:URL Structure Change

Hello,

I am contacting GTA Wiki to inform you that effective mid-day Thursday (about 36 hours from this message being posted), Wikia will be changing the URL structure of this community to have the  snippet re-added to the address. This wikia has previously been one of just two dozen that has a URL structure without the  snippet.

To be transparent, the reasons for this change are two-fold.

First, Wikia is continuing work on our new skin called Mercury. Mercury is not a re-skin of the basic Desktop look, but rather an adaptive skin that will port key Desktop functionality over to Mobile (in fact, Mobile Web is mostly running on Mercury as it is). By having all of Wikia on a single URL structure, we can eliminate a lot of coding use cases, making the skin more lightweight in terms of performance and friendly to newer engineers trying to build new services on top of our platform. In addition, moving forward as Wikia continues to grow as a platform, it may make sense for us to delineate parts of a wikia through URL structure instead of namespaces. For instance  could bring you to the Admin Dashboard. Nothing like that is set in stone by any means, but at the very least having everything unified on URL structure will help future development.

Second, the /wiki snippet has been proven to help with SEO when we compared similar communities with differing URL structures. Based on our research, it seems many people tend to search for "(TOPIC) Wiki" instead of "(TOPIC) community" or "(TOPIC) page". Having the /wiki URL snippet dramatically increases the visibility of your wikia on search engines.

We have done a number of tests to prevent any bugs. If anything seems out of whack Thursday with the URL structure, please let me know either by replying to this or sending a message to Special:Contact. Please also remember to check your CSS or JS files to make sure that you are pointing to the right URLs. Old URLs should redirect, but it never hurts of course to have the most accurate URL in your files. --DaNASCAT (help forum | blog) 04:47, August 5, 2015 (UTC)