Overview

Redirects in Jive are useful when you need a specific page to be reachable with an additional or different URL.

Information

• How do redirects work?
• When to use redirects?
• Creating a redirect
• Redirection limitations
• Best practices for URL redirects

How do redirects work?

A standard HTTP Redirect is accomplished in the following way:

• the client requests a web page, for example, https://community.jiveon.com/page1
• the server replies with an HTTP 30X (301, 302...) return code, and the new address, for example:

  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Location: https://community.jiveon.com/page2

• the client then automatically requests and displays the new page https://community.jiveon.com/page2, without any action needed from the end-user

The most commonly used return codes are HTTP 301 (Moved permanently) and HTTP 302 (Moved temporarily).

When to use redirects?

There are many reasons why redirects can be useful:

• For URL shortening.
• To prevent broken links when web pages are moved.
• To allow multiple domain names belonging to the same owner to refer to a single website.
• To guide navigation into and out of a website.
• For privacy protection.

Creating a redirect

In Jive, you can manage page-level redirects by navigating to the Redirection Rules page in the Admin Console, from Admin console > System > Settings > Redirection Rules:

Steps to enable a Redirect

1. Under the Add new customer redirect rule section, Enter the source URL (from) in the Input URL field. This is the page from where the visitors will be redirected.
2. Enter the destination URL (to) in the Output URL field. This is the page to be displayed when navigating to the URL entered in Step 1.
3. Select the type of redirect in the Redirection type URL field. In most cases, it is recommended to use the 301 option (permanent redirect)
4. Click Save.

Redirection limitations

• The main limitation of redirects in Jive is that there is a limit of 7,500 redirects per community.
• The following pages CANNOT be redirected:
  • Vanity URLs
  • Home page and profile pages
  • URLs with parameters
  • System URLs (for example, maintenance pages)
  • Login pages
• Since Jive Cloud AWS version 2017.1, the ability to redirect an internal page to an external URL was removed. This was due to prevent potential security issues.
• URL redirects in Jive do not support the usage of regular expressions (REGEX) or wildcards.

Best practices for URL redirects

Whenever possible, redirects should be one-to-one and not cascade or contain more than one hop. Redirects that use multiple hops can impact web search crawlers and potentially impact your community performance. An example of a redirect with multiple hops is when URL-A redirects to URL-B which, in turn, redirects to URL-C.