Incorrect? Please! =) Incorrect is misleading other people with answers that don't relate to their questions while promoting a commercial product on the thread of a free alternative version.

If you really want to prove it can be done, although that wasn't the question of Smiry, and add some useful info while you're at it, you should have said:
"Not really. It can be done without the ID only if you use vBSEO which is a commercial product with encrypted source and costs a lot more than your vB license. Here's my URL to prove it."

This thread is about vRewrite and in that context and until further change, it is not possible to remove the id from that URL!

The way vRewrite currently handles all the URLs is done by ID searching. The way vBSEO is done (to my understanding as I've never used it) is done by one file which everything goes through. vRewrite 1.5 (if I ever get to it) is done by many entries in the mod_rewrite to handle all the rewrites, not done by one file. Which is why vBSEO can handle it without IDs, and vRewrite currently can't.

Tutorial on custom rewrites/changing rewrtires

The first thing is first, back up all files!

The next thing you want to decide if you are doing a new rewrite or modifying an existing one. Either way, we will need to modify the .htaccess mod_rewrite rules. If you are modifying an already existing one, try and find which rule it is (it is pretty self-explanatory, the (.*) and $# represent variables in the rewrite). If you are creating a new one, copy off of one and use it as a template.

RewriteRule ^f-(.*)-(.*).html forumdisplay.php?f=$2 [L]

What this is telling us, is anything that starts with an f and then has two variables - separated by a hyphen applies to this rewrite. Since we don't care about the name of the forum, we only want the $2 aka the ID of the forum. Let's say we want it to be forumid.html. We will need to rewrite the rule to be:

RewriteRule ^forum(.*).html forumdisplay.php?f=$1 [L]

It really is that simple! Before we continue, you want to make sure you have the rule correct. Just go to yourforum.com/forum(some real id here).html. Does it work? If it does, then you did it correctly (and if you used that example) otherwise don't go on until you perfected that rewrite rule.

Now this is where the fun begins at. We will need to modify the plugin, but for member/showthread/forumdisplay there are an if statement to decide if we are on that. So if you are modifying any of these three, go to vB Options->vRewrite and choose the first rewrite option. We do not want the second!

Now go to ACP->Plugin Manager->vRewrite under global_complete. Edit it. This is where it gets messy so I would suggest playing with it on a test vB first, and then just copy and paste the code over. It's very easy to make a small mistake and cause a white page (aka a parse error).

Each rewrite rule is commented out like so:


#------------------------------
# Replace Forums
#------------------------------

But first we see
This is what I was talking about earlier. If you are using any of the 3 discussed above, skip down until you see the second one (in this case the second replace forums). There are only two for forumdisplay/showthread/member.

Here is what mine says now.

Now we don't worry about anything besides the str_replace. The first part of the str_replace stays the same. However, the second part you see:

Using our example from above, we would change this to:

It really is that simple! You just got to be very careful when you upgrade vRewrite. Any questions, please keep 'em in the thread as I "technically" don't support this, but I may not notice ;)

Thanks for the tutorial! =) Very nice!
Made my edits without any problem, except that the pull-down menus on vboptions still reflect the previous (default) values.
How can I change these?

You will need to turn your vB into debug mode, and then edit those settings. Or do I need step-by-step instructions? hehe

A quick question, looking at the global_complete code, I see a lot of db queries that I assume are used to get some extra info not available on vb's forumcache like forum names, etc.
If we were going back to basics, using just the numeric ids, and having urls like: /f$id/, /t$id/, etc, would those queries still be needed?

No thanks! =) Wicked! First time I turn on debug mode so never saw that before! Thanks again! =)

Sure don't :)

Don't? Cool! Might seem odd but I'll try to mod it down to bare basics.
My host is sponsoring my site, charging me nothing for all that I use so I'm always extra careful not to waste their resources on unnecessary stuff!

Just to be sure I'm not making it worse, would you say that this is enough?
#------------------------------
# Replace User
#------------------------------
$found = preg_match_all('#member\.php\?u=([0-9]+)#i', $output, $matches);
if($found)
{
$output = str_replace("member.php?u=$uid", "member/$uid/", $output);
}

You'll need it put it in a while loop, I'll try and get you the code tomorrow. :)