Why am I getting different url's in Confluence (one includes a page title, the other a page id)?

[DebbieR]

Sorry for a dumb question, but can someone explain to me why urls in Confluence differ? I don't think I'm doing anything differently.

ie: Why does this url contain the title of the Confluence page (http://skb.sterland.com/display/FRAM/Payment+Selection+Batches), yet this one contains a pageid and not the title (http://skb.sterland.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=106201209)?

Is there anyway to update the url and how?

Thanks very much,

[William Scarce]

Not a dumb question and honestly you'll be trying to fix these as long as you work with Confluence. Problem here is that the page that has the padid in the URL most likely has a special character in the title. Special characters = {}&*#$(), etc. Almost anything except the dash. To fix remove (or have the author remove) the special character. Doesn't seem like a big deal, but with a pageid in the URL they won't resolve and can cause problems if/when a page moves.

Hope this helps.

William 

[Steven F Behnke]

Very common question: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Confluence+Page+URL's+Contain+pageId+Instead+of+The+Page+Title

[DebbieR]

oh wow, I have no idea how many pages I have with special characters in the title, hoping it's no where near 800!. Thanks so much for your help.

[William Scarce]

Unfortunately there's no way to allow special characters (at least as of on prem 5.4.4) Seems to be something quirky with how Confluence was engineered. More puzzling is the fact that personal spaces have an apostrophe in the home page by default. Not sure how big your community is, but we had about 7% of our pages using special character (3500) and through education and reminders have fixed about 800 of those.

[DebbieR]

Thanks so much William. You were spot on. I had a backslash in the title. Is there anyway to still have special characters in the title, or they're simply a no go?

Thanks again,