I was sitting at my desk today doing anything other than work and I was really trying to figure out how you fix something like that. The old forum internally links to itself but those posts are essentially frozen. For every link as you converted a forum from (usually) one proprietary database to another you would have to cache, detect and automatically edit every link both in and outside url tags to correctly redirect to the same post/page but under the new forum system. That I am aware of no such system exists that can do that.
So you're saying there's a market for it!
I'm no coder, but I figure one way to do it would be to have a program that searches up the current location of what was being linked to via the keywords and append the new link to the old while inserting or deleting some character in the old link to invalidate/break it. (delete URL tags?)
That way, if anything goes wrong, the keyword clues of the old link are still available.
Still have to give it a way to recognize the difference between current/functional links, old/broken in-forum links, dead in-forum links, and old/dead/broken external links.
Not being a programmer, I have no idea how complex that would be!
Another option would be to insert the corrected links in a new post appended to the end of a thread, but that would be really messy, as all old threads would be brought to the forefront again. So yeah, nix that idea.
Is kinda scary to loose any such theoretical program upon the forum with full mod/staff-level editing permissions!
Not sure if there would be any way to do a dry-run for testing purposes.
Maybe test it on a single thread, then a sub-category, then a category, then the whole forum? That might catch any issues introduced by the scale of what it does.
Heck, even just an automatic link-conversion program on its own page where you could open a new tab, input an old link, and get the new one would be an improvement over doing the hunting yourself.
