How can supporters reach your forms? Let’s look at subdomains, URLs, redirects and aliases.
Subdomain
Your Impact Stack installation is hosted on our servers in Germany, using the subdomain set up during the onboarding process. This subdomain appears in the URL (Universal Resource Locator or web address) of all your forms.
For example, if your organisation’s website is www.yourcharity.org the subdomain action.yourcharity.org could be set up to point to your Impact Stack installation on our servers. Your subdomain might be action, secure, campaign or something similar.
Hosting using a subdomain reassures your supporters that they’re still on ‘your website’ and also allows us to comply with strict levels of spam controls, as all the emails generated by your actions are sent from this authorised subdomain. More on email deliverability and DMARC.
Node ID
When you create a new piece of content in Impact Stack, the system will give it a node ID. This number never changes, and is never reused (eg if an item is deleted, the node ID won’t be recycled), so it’s a permanent ‘address’ for that content item. The node ID number will be visible in the address bar when you open an item to edit it. If you need to contact support about a form, providing the node ID will help us identify exactly which form we need to look at.
Thank you pages have their own node ID, which is almost always the next sequentially, as it will have been the next item created. (ie a form which is node 10 will usually have node 11 for its thank you page).
URL alias
Impact Stack will, by default, create a more human-readable and keyword rich address, or alias, based on the page title. You can override this in the Advanced settings > URL path settings on the content step.
Just toggle the setting ‘Generate automatic URL alias’ to OFF, and add your preferred alias below. Impact Stack will automatically create a redirect from the old alias.
You can view all aliases, and which node numbers they correspond with, in the Site settings under Search and metadata.
Redirects
Redirects allow you to bounce people from a form to a new location. Impact Stack will create redirects automatically if you change the URL alias of a form.
You can also create a redirect to a new location if an action has closed, but you don’t want to lose the traffic. Find out how to do this in our How to end an action article.
Make sure you test redirects carefully to make sure you don’t set up a circular set of redirects, or send supporters to a dead end.
You can view a list of all redirects for your installation in the Site settings, and you can see a list of all aliases which are redirecting to the current form in the Advanced settings > URL redirects on the content step of a form.
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