Cannot create channel

[chris76423]

I have a category "Staff Section" where i want to create the channel "todo".

I get the following error message:

Error: An unexpected error was returned: 'Duplicate route data: forum/staff\-section/todo(?:/page(?P[0-9]+))?'

Any ideas?

[Mark.B]

Do you have multiple forums with duplicate names? If so, then you should rename one slightly.

[chris76423]

Now that you mention it i had the same category / channel name some time ago. But deleted it.

So it is not there anymore but i still can't create a new one.

[chris76423]

Is there a way to clear this "route data" so i can create the same channel / category combination again.

I just tested it and it happens all the time once you delete a created channel and try to create it again.

[vbSuperfan]

The same thing just happened to me, with one important difference: The forum that used to have the same name as the one I attempted to create was not actually deleted, but rather renamed to something completely different.

Although it could be understandable that vBulletin doesn't want to modify these "routing URLs" once they have been assigned to a forum (in order not to invalidate old links to the old forum in question, that is), I still think that:

A)
It could still be desirable sometimes, in order to avoid some really wacky, confusing and undesirable routing-URL-based links to a renamed forum. Therefore, changing the "routing URL" for a forum when renaming it should still be optionally possible.

B)
The described way of handling such duplicated routing URLs when creating a new forum should be implemented in a much more graceful way, including the option to manually specify an alternative routing URL for the new forum when such collisions occur, instead of just cancelling the entire creation of the new forum (with a highly confusing error message at that, to make matters even worse). Actually, there should always be an option to manually specify the routing URL when creating a new forum, and even an option to manually change it for any existing forum at any time.


Finally, a work-around for all of you having this problem, coming here through Google in order to find out how to create your new forum with the name you want:

Simply initially name your new forum to whatever you'd like the routing URL to be based on. Then, immediately after having successfully created the forum, edit it and rename it to whatever you wanted the forum to be named to initially. Done.

[Wayne Luke]

If this is still happening in vBulletin 5.6.4 PL1, it should be considered to be a bug. The system is supposed to add a suffix of _aa, _bb, etc... to get around duplicate URL Idents.

If you're not running vBulletin 5.6.4 PL1 then you should upgrade immediately.

I am also going to close this topic because 6 year old topics shouldn't be considered relevant. Customers should open a new topic for their specific issues, not search the forums and resurrect old and out of date topics.