ElkArte Community Modern, Free, Powerful
Community building forum software

Hi,

So... I am fully aware of the Search Engine friendly urls under Admin > Configuration > Features and Options > General that enables search engine friendly urls.

I've enabled it... however, I've noticed it doesn't do much other than more or less making links static. It's not really in human readable format.

The PrettyURLs mod from SMF allowed you to specficy how exactly you wanted the links to look and took it and ran with it. Will there be an option for this in the future in a mod or something similar?

A while ago I ported SimpleSEF, but at the moment the package is badly outdated (I think it's still for a beta or so). I should find some time to fix it...

I don't know how pretty urls mod for SMF is now, but last time I use it my forum became slower. After a year of use I decided to remove that mod. I did not find any advantage in terms of SEO.

I didn't notice much of an impact, if any. I have it live currently on one of my forum sites. It's not given me any performance issues... and when that did happen, it was because of my multi-tasking on my laptop. :p Or not enough bandwidth at a given time.

A couple of key differences between the things I see being discussed here. The original feature in SMF/ELK on search engine friendly URL's was just that back in the day "Made for search engines". Search engines are much smarter these days, and can handle dynamic URL's with ease.

The big request here is to have Friendly URL's (better for humans to remember). Bots these days can handle either. I think it would be good to change ELK to have more friendly URL's like:
/page_template/topic_id/message_id = /index/135/34
Or for things in profile like /profile/view
Boards could be /board_name/child_name etc.  These would be pretty big changes for ELK to take on, but worth it in a major revision IMO. Lots of people ask for this stuff.

I think you are right something that is wanted but a huge task to take on.