[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by phlogiston

I understand that the SEO benefits of rewriting forum thread urls is very debatable - I was pointing out an unrelated benefit for real human people rather.

Very often Joe Public won't take your links and give them good context, they'll be copy-pasted asis. For people reading those links pasted to other sites or in a blog, before clicking on it, a showthread link gives me no idea where I'll end up other than the domain and "it's a forum".

A rewritten url offers extra human readable clues BEFORE BEING CLICKED through to the page to discover the pagetitle or content.

...which I don't think will make the slightest difference to human visitors. They are going to click on links from a search engine and what will determine those links is a combination of how far down the list the link is and the snippet.

Nobody will remember anything except the domain and tld (forum.com) anyway.

mod_rewrite has its uses, primarily if the software you're usiing creates search-engine-UNfriendly URLs - vBulletin does not do that out-of-the-box so the impact of mod_rewrite is extra server load and little else - except for creating additional things that can go wrong, which is likely the case with the poster where I raised the issue in the first place.