redirect incoming links to correct path

[taurul]

Hello,
I have just migrated my forum from drupal to vbulletin and I have some old links which links to the old version of the website. Now the links point to a wrong url path in vbulletin. Could some one tell me how could I redirect those links to my new threads, I could add them manually to the forum pages I want.
Thank you.

[Wayne Luke]

You would need to create a regex to redirect from the old Drupal format to the new vBulletin format. The biggest issue is that vBulletin won't have stored the node ID that was used in DRUPAL. You should discuss this with the company that did the conversion. Maybe they stored those node ids somewhere and you can use that to redirect properly.

We don't have any such tools currently.

[taurul]

there is no difference except the forum word in the path
old url path is
domainname.com/forum/thread-name/topicname
new vbulleting path
domainname.com/forum/forum/thread-name/topicname

[taurul]

is there a possibility for some wrong links which comes to my forum to wrong paths to redirect them manually to the correct paths?

[Mark.B]

This isn't something we can realistically provide support for, beyond what Wayne has said.
Whoever did your conversion should be providing assistance. We don't have sufficient knowledge of Drupal.

[Wayne Luke]

This isn't about a knowledge of Drupal. At its base, Drupal uses a node system just like vBulletin. A basic url would be /domain.tld/node/XXXXX. A vBulletin's basic URL is /domain.tld/node/YYYYY. You have to match XXXXX with its corresponding YYYYY value. This would be easy if all we had were basic URLS. vBulletin even has the mechanics to do this built into its routing system. So if we knew YYYYY and it was stored with XXXXX, we could redirect. They generally won't be the same after an import.

However, every site picks its URL structure. The names of its containers (we call them channels) and their contents. So a channel could be named a_forum and it has ten nodes in it. Each is a topic. So the URLs would be /domain.tld/forum/a_forum/XXX-topic_1 through /domain.tld/a_forum/XXX-topic_10. So when your old Drupal URL comes to the server, it says give me domain.tld/section/section/node/YYY. Your web server (probably Apache) takes this string and converts it into something that Drupal can read. Now, if you have the YYYYY values mapped to their corresponding XXXXX node values in vBulletin, you could redirect this within the system. Pull the URL from the Route table and say oh that means this. Unfortunately, we have no idea what your URLs mapped to or even if the old node id values are even available anymore. Since you've migrated, we can't even assume that your database structure is the same as standard vBulletin's.

A good system administrator may be able to write the proper redirects in the .htaccess. If that fails, vBulletin has an option under Settings -> Options -> General Settings to redirect all 404 errors to its home page.

[taurul]

I didn't explain you correctly, I have different backlinks (from different website) to my old url paths, can I use a redirect tool or to add 301 redirect manually to the current forum pages?

[Wayne Luke]

I understand what you need. You need to do this at the server level using .htaccess or similar tools.

https://linchpinseo.com/htaccess-rules/

[taurul]

it's not working, i've edited the htaccess but the redirect doesn't work.