Suggested Feature Addition: optional general redirect to all lowercase URLs

[jrpstonecarver]

I inherited a website full of files with names in mixed case, and I made it worse before I learned not to do that.

It is, frankly, a bit of a disaster. I watch the 404 errors logged by the Redirection plugin, and I see a fair number that come from search engines that lowercase URLs for unknown reasons. (Facebook does this to me regularly with PDF files. When it finds them, I see several 404s for each one as they try it - repeatedly - in all lowercase. Go figure.)

Over time I am going to rename every file on this website with an all lowercase filename. It will take forever, but it will get done. As it happens, of course, I will have to add redirects to deal with the file name changes, and there will be many of those. But in the end it will all be done, and I'd like to have an automated way to force all incoming URLs into lowercase, rather than having zillions of specific redirects in the database.

There are plugins that cause 301 redirects to force all lowercase in URLs, but none of them that I examined are installed by a lot of sites, and I have no clue how well they are maintained. Plus, I don't know if they would work with Redirection also installed. Alternatively, I could add the needed code to the .htaccess file to force the same behaviour.

But your Redirection plugin is both well maintained and highly used. It is the king of redirects, so it seems like a useful feature to add would let it force URLs into lowercase in a general way. I suppose there could be lots of options for it. Some of the plugins let you only force the change on specific file types, for example. But I am only guessing there. I am 100% certain you know far more about this than I do.

But it would be great to get a feature addition to generally (and optionally) force URLs into lowercase. I will definitely need it in the future.

Thanks for considering it!

[J-J-Chiarella]

If I may add, I would also like such a feature. The existing plugins for redirects for casing seem to be unmaintained.

Additionally, I am currently using a locked-down deployment. I cannot alter the .htaccess or add new plugins beyond the Redirection one here.

The proposed fix for making everything lowercase would also solve problems with looping. If I go to another website, I can set the redirection to ignore the case (casing) and be fine. If I want to stay on the website, however, it is another story.

In this scenario, the easiest thing to do is to create one redirect that redirects from/post [Ignore Case] to /post, but this action will create a loop that breaks the page. The correct casing too falls under the umbrella of “things to get away from” and will trigger a redirect—to itself. Thus, with an infinite loop, this page becomes broken. I cannot do anything except to accept the duplicates for ordinary posts and 404 errors for the RSS feeds when any uppercase letters¹ appear in the URL.

In order to implement this, I see two options:

1. A clear warning or pop-up will tell you that if you have any assets in the media library in uppercase, they will no longer work.
2. Simple restriction for only posts and pages—nothing else.
3. Smart restriction for posts, pages, and feeds.

I recommend option one. I use the plugin PowerPress. It relies on a special feed that generates (/feed/podcast/, /feed/podcast,² /podcast/, and /podcast).³ As a consequence, option two could result in merely partial success. It would resolve the duplicate issue for posts but not the 404 issues with a URL for the feed that has uppercase letters, wrongly, in the URL.

Thank you for your time.

Footnotes

1. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z are the uppercase letters in ASCII. We can safely set aside other characters. The uppercase Eszett and uppercase dotted I do not appear in standard URLs. ↩

2. I use this because it does not have the trailing slash—and it is not a directory. (The whole thing with the homepage and the trailing slash is actually a beginning slash as the main webpage is the highest in the hierarchy on Unix—I think—and so a trailing slash is only useful for relative assets that are never reshared.) The word feed is also present in the URL (in a way that is delineated by periods, slashes, or hyphens) and feed itself. (The contents have a self-reference in the opening.) Maybe that helps discoverability (?). ↩

3. I am not held up by the trailing slash matter for now. It is easy for me to make just one more redirect that goes from the version with a trailing slash to one without it. ↩