I'm trying to create quck access links to content sections on pages that I access regularly, such as Careers Interactions: Careers-Interactions

I'm worried that I might be creating a mess in the site-wide anchor tags because there's no way to identify which specific page an anchor tag belongs to. I tried adding the title of the page in the URL structure but then the anchor tag is long, repetitive and not quite search engine friendly:

nraasdotnet/community/Careers-Interactions#Careers-Interactions-Show-Debugging

(I don't mind at all if all the tags I ever created are deleted. Go ahead.)

Is it possible to create page-specific anchor tags on the website?

I'll refrain from editing pages further.

I'm not sure I understand the question. If you want to anchor to a specific article on a listing page then the pre-generated title anchors are the way to go which is how you've done it.

Actually the "Careers Interactions" page didn't have pre-generated title anchors, so I made them up from scratch. Here is a screenshot of the current title anchors, (the ones I created are in yellow):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/crmxwuonms7yg ... s.jpg?dl=0

I guess my question is, is there any way the anchors selection list could look closer to this?:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/cen ... 0627054351

MissPatTS3 wrote: ↑

October 8th, 2019, 8:25 pm

Actually the "Careers Interactions" page didn't have pre-generated title anchors, so I made them up from scratch. Here is a screenshot of the current title anchors, (the ones I created are in yellow)

I'm still not following I'm afraid. Each interaction on that page has an anchor to the left of the title.

I think the misunderstanding here might be a matter of semantics. The anchor is the target, those already exist. I believe what MissPatTS3 is trying to create are more user-friendly, less verbose links to new anchors such as one might see on a TOC, but away from the actual page so as not to require the full URL of the page as part of the link address.

For example, wwwdotblahdotcom#anchor, not wwwdotblahdotcom/page name#long-anchor-name.

But correct me if I am not reading this right.

You got a huge part of it right, igazor!

I'm going to try and explain step by step.
1) For modding purpose, I regularly need to access content on a specific page of the Nraas website, let's call it the "Schools Mods" page.
First Problem: the page's content is very long and has zero TOC section.
Second Problem: the page has zero pre-existing anchor links to put together such a TOC section.

2) I decide to edit the page to make it easier to navigate through the long page content.
First action: since there is zero anchors on the page, I go ahead and take the initiative of creating the first one.
For the name of the anchor I choose "debug".
The URL of the anchor looks great now, it's short, like wwwdotblahdotcom/schools-mod#debug

3) Now there are about 10 more anchors to create on the page.
When I'm done creating my second anchor, I head to the anchor selection dropdown menu. And I see:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/crmxwuonms7yg ... s.jpg?dl=0

First problem: The anchors are not listed in alphabetical order, which makes it difficult to locate quickly the ones I created.
Second problem: I had not realized that other registered users before me had created similar anchors to me. And I have no idea which other, specific page their similar anchors are referencing to. The anchors dropdown menu does not help me to realize if I might be creating duplicate content or editing outdated content for the Schools mod.
Future problem anticipation: What if the content on the website grows and there is a need to create 10+ pages on the topic, each with multiple "school mods" anchor links needing to be created? Sure we can create longer anchor links like:this:

wwwdothblahdotcom/schools-mod#schools-mod-advanced

But the anchor selection dropdown menu would still not be showing on which specific page all those lengthy "school mods" anchors reside. If the Forum's dropdown menu cannot look closer to this, then it might become increasingly difficult to manage and scale the scope of the content on the Nraas website:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/cen ... 0627054351

I think if we keep using the current anchor creation process (described in step 1 and 2 above), it risks discouraging forum users to add and edit content because the anchors are confusing to sort out and impossible to edit.
It also risks turning the Nraas website URLs into red flags for search engines bots because they are usually reluctant to index URLs that repeat many times the same words: it looks like spam on search results thus reducing the visibility of Nraas and its wealth of content to the world wide web.

So yes implementing a solution like this would work great (I repurposed igazor's message):

create [more] user-friendly links to the anchors such as one might see on a TOC, but [with a site-wide feature / policy for creating easily identifiable anchors] so as 1) not to confuse anchors that belong to different pages, 2) not to create lengthy and "spammy" URLs for the anchor links

I'm an overthinker so it's very much likely I'm overthinking this and anticipating content scalability issues way too early.

But does this at least help to better understand my point?

Check this "knowledge base" forum extension::
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... edge_base/

Essentially it makes possible to:
- group pages under easily identifiable categories
- create page-specific anchor titles using BBcode, which eliminates the need to create long + 'spammy' anchor URLs

I think most of these issues will be resolved once I fix the auto generated TOC as you won't need to create anchors for these pages then. I don't see a major issue with the longer anchors because they are meant to be something you copy and paste and let the user know the exact section they should expect to see. There hasn't been a ton of solid research that I've found that says search engines derank for anchor tags. The page name duplicating in the anchor is an internal issue that can be resolved. While you can create anchors, the page system isn't built with users creating anchors in mind because that got messy on Wikispaces with the anchor and content duplication you're discussing due to users who didn't really understand how anchors work editing the pages. Most things are auto generated to prevent the pages formatting from turning into the nightmare I had to unravel during the move. However, if you guys think I should reconsider this after the TOC is fixed then let me know and I can allow custom anchors to be set per page section rather than auto generating them.

I think most of these issues will be resolved once I fix the auto generated TOC as you won't need to create anchors for these pages then. [...] The page name duplicating in the anchor is an internal issue that can be resolved.

Sounds good.

There hasn't been a ton of solid research that I've found that says search engines derank for anchor tags.

They don't risk deranking for anchors but for any URL considered 'spammy'. I understand this isn't a long-term risk due to upcoming fixes.

[...] the page system isn't built with users creating anchors in mind because that got messy on Wikispaces with the anchor and content duplication you're discussing due to users who didn't really understand how anchors work editing the pages.

Yeah that was my point. I have been wanting to contribute to Nraas content for a while myself but I didn't want to create any mess in doing so.

Most things are auto generated to prevent the pages formatting from turning into the nightmare I had to unravel during the move.

Got it! I appreciate your work on this.

However, if you guys think I should reconsider this after the TOC is fixed then let me know and I can allow custom anchors to be set per page section rather than auto generating them.

Sounds good. Thanks for being open to the idea and for the prompt answer Chain_Reaction, I really appreciate it.