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How Forum URLs Work

"URL" is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator.  It is the convention for identifying the location of anything available to a browser on the internet.  People often refer to a website's URL as its "address," and the URL for any page that you view in a browser is displayed in the "Address" window of the browser.

The URLs used on the Basin forums go beyond what you will find elsewhere.  In addition to directing your browser to a static page (the typical use to which URLs are put), the Basin uses forum URLs to create many of the pages that you see.

Let's consider a typical Basin forum URL.  (Don't bother trying this example in your browser because it won't work.  As Sergeant Friday might say, "Some of the characters have been changed to protect the innocent." We're using it here just to illustrate the structure of a forum URL.)

The best way to understand Basin forum URLs is to focus first on the "?" symbol in the middle.  Everything in the URL to that left of that symbol is serving one function, and everything to the right is serving another.  We'll cover both halves here.

The section of the address to the left of the "?" is actually a standard URL all by itself.  In this example, and with any of the forum URLs you will see as you surf the site, you can copy/paste that segment of the address into your browser's search window, hit "Enter," and it will take you to a Basin forum page.  In the example above, the segment of the URL to the left of the "?" would take you to the main page of the Basin's D2 forums.

That section of the address follows the typical address conventions that you see for sites all over the internet.  Here are each of the parts for that section of the URL:

By contrast, everything you see to the right of the "?" symbol is unique to URLs for the Basin forums.  And for surfing the forums, that's the portion of the URL where all the action is.

Let's look at this half of our example URL, beginning with the "?" symbol:

This half of the URL is comprised of five major parts, each of which is connected with the "&" symbol.  Each part is a variable that is set to a specific value.  (In software, a variable is akin to a container.  A value is whatever the contents of that container might be.) In each of those five parts the variable is separated from its value by the "=" symbol, and the "=" symbol actually tells the Basin server to set that variable at the value shown to the right of the "=" symbol.

Here are the five variables that we are looking at, with an explanation of what they do:

Our sample URL assigns the following values to these variables:

When you are surfing the forums and click on the link to a forum thread, it seems as though you are simply connecting to an existing page holding that thread.  But in reality, there is no such page.  When you click the link, your browser connects to the basin server and the page is created for your display.  Your clicking on the link sends out the URL associated with it.  Using our hypothetical URL, it commands:

Your browser connects with the Basin server, the server executes the query defined by the URL, and you see the thread as a result.