Scandinavian characters in URLs

[Peinttaaja.fi]

I am hoping Ning could change the way the scandinavian characters "ä" and "ö" are changed when making urls for blog and forum posts.

Currently ä and ö are automatically replaced with "-" in URLs (or omitted totally if situated in the end of a word), which messes the URLs up for the search engines and can make them pretty unreadable if there is lots of those characters.

(Current system is better than previous, where "ä" became "ae," which might have been better fonetically, but even worse for search engines.)

"Normal" way to write the offending characters in URLs is without the extra dots, so ä = a, ö = o.

That is what people do with their email addresses if their names contain ä or ö, so it basically is what is expected.

So I think blog post named...

"Mistähän tässä on kysymys?" (What is this all about?)

...should make an url...

"/profiles/blogs/mistahan-tassa-on-kysymys" (which is pretty readable)

..and not...

"/profiles/blogs/mist-h-n-t-ss-on-kysymys" (in which you can guess what it means)

I think similar problems might occur with other Scandinavian letters, like å, æ, ø and œ, but I don't know how they are normally handled, but if this sort of change could be made, it probably would make sense to change them all to act in the way people expect them to be presented in URLs and consult with some Swedish, Danish or Norwegian network creators.

[Evan]

Hi there!

Thanks for reporting this. We've seen this before, but I actually thought we fixed this. In fact, when I tested this, here's what I saw:

It seems like this is functioning as it should. If you're not seeing that, could you drop us a note in the Help Center so we can check it out?

/Evan

[Peinttaaja.fi]

For some reason it works ok as in your picture, when you make a page with admin account (and then you could customize the url anyway).

But when you make a blog post or forum post with normal user account, the Scandinavian characters are omitted.

[Evan]

Hi there,

That's actually a screenshot of a blog post, so it seems like it's working on our end. I encourage you to contact our support team so we can look at this for you.

/Evan

[Peinttaaja.fi]

Please try it out with "normal" user account, I think in the picture it is an admin account due to there being the customization field for URL.

Just tested it again and with admin account works ok, but with basic user account the ö and ä get omitted, happens both in blogs and forum messages :(.

[Jaana T.]

I have been wondering same thing for a while. Thanks Peinttaaja for bringing this up.

[Peinttaaja.fi]

I made a support ticket about this, just got a reply back that is has been assigned to the bug list, so it will probably be eventually sorted out :).