Guild Directory Links are Broken for any guild starting with a non alphanumeric

[Ranger Nietzsche]

I created my guilds listing recently, and discovered that no one can use the directory in order to view it. Clicking on the link in the directory yields a "Guild not found." page.

I checked with a dozen other guilds. Essentially any guild which begins with a non alphanumeric character has broken links from the directory.

The page can still be viewed with a direct link like

http://www.guildcafe.com/GuildAd.php?guildid=14171
and
http://www.thespearmen.guildcafe.com

but the link the directory uses to find the page:
http://www.guildcafe.com/guild-profi...armen-_#52824;

is broken, somehow relating to using the first letter not being alphanumeric.

[Roxianna]

The guild directory attempts to use URLs that the search engines can deal with. Ideally if you search on your guild and game name in say Google, it will come up with your listing on GuildCafe pretty high on the page. We went to a lot of trouble to do thing this way so that your guild can be found.

The side effect of this is that guilds with characters that are not legal in a URL are going to have broken links, thus we don't show them. If you are serious about your guild's Web presence, I would recommend dropping the special characters from the name. You can always have them appear in your design, but they are never going to work on search engines or on any SEO friendly site.