SteelBytes wrote:
could you make it so if I click a link to a comment in the same thread that it doesn't open a new tab? ie if it's on the same page then it can just scroll and if it's a different page then change content of tab.
Are you talking about the post links (see image below)?
Those @#%^ things are the bane of my existence. They're a legacy thing from the early days of this forum software, and they have been no end of pain. BingBot (and to a lesser degree GoogleBot) insists on crawling those non-canonical versions of forum content, despite my having done everything in my power to indicate that they are NOT canonical content and should NOT be crawled.
I currently have a removal request lodged with google to remove about 400,000 of them.
So, the point of those post links (if we're talking about the same thing, and I am not entirely sure we are) is to provide a permanent and direct link to the post in question, regardless of which page it happens to be on. The textbook example is that if a post is the first post on page 2, and a post on page 1 gets removed, then the first post on page 2 actually slips back to page one, and renders previous links to it as invalid.
So your suggestion, while it would seem to make some sense, would also tend to defeat the purpose of the permanent post links.
But honestly, I'm half inclined to get rid of them and return 404s to the idiot search engines.