Topic numbers not names.

[ceekay27]

Hi I moderated an SMF forum for around 5 years, and the topics all had the topic name in the address bar at the top. Ive recently made my own forum and noticed that my topics are all numbered in the address bar rather than named. Like above actually in this one:
community/index.php?action=post;board=147.0
Why is this? And is there a way to change it to names rather than numbers?

[Arantor]

Well, first up, the forum you moderated has the Pretty URLs extension installed. It's certainly not a standard feature.

What you see here and on your forum are the standard approach: just use the topic number itself. It's leaner, it's faster and it makes no difference with SEO any more to have names in topics.

If you really must have them, search the mod section for 'Pretty URLs' and install it, and hope it doesn't break anything else on your installation (because that's a frequent thing)

[ceekay27]

Ah pretty URLS, I do remember seeing that...

If you really must have them, search the mod section for 'Pretty URLs' and install it, and hope it doesn't break anything else on your installation (because that's a frequent thing)

That put me right off!  I've worked hard on my site, would rather not screw it up just to have a named link rather than numbers.
Thanks for your input and help