Question about this website's URL

[KhandakeF]

I just noticed that the URL goes main/forum/Off-topic or main/forum/General-Discussion for all the different sections.

 

What is that 'forum' for? I get that main is the homepage, but what's the 'forum' for if all the different sections get listed anyway after the 'forum' one

[2FA]

On the webserver itself, these webpages are stored in file directories identical to the URL. All of the web pages for the individual subforums are located within a file directory called "forum." It's technically not necessary but having a defined structure allows for easier management.

[colonel_mortis]

The URL gets passed to a piece of code called the dispatcher, which looks at it and decides what to output. If the URL was just /main/50-off-topic/, the dispatcher wouldn't know whether that is forum 50 (which is Off Topic), topic 50 (which was posted in January 2013 about AMD's new processors), image 50 in the gallery, etc. Having the /forum/ (or /topic/, /gallery/image/, etc) part lets the dispatcher know what type of content you want.

 

The URL structure doesn't correspond in any useful way to pages that you can actually visit - the URL for this topic isn't an extension of the URL for Off Topic. Instead, the structure of the URLs is designed to make it easy for the dispatcher to decide what page you want.