Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-1738746-20150827120908/@comment-24473195-20150828102618

SethFu wrote: I don't think I can enlighten you regarding the finer details, but my guess is that this behavior comes from the fact that templates can take named parameters like, which allows you to specifiy only some parameters while not confusing the template because of the order it expects them to be set. As a result, if a template call has equal signs, they get interpreted as part of a variable definition.

(In this case, the server probably thinks that  [http://forums.dragcave.net/index.php?showtopic  is a variable, 157479&view is its value, and then it gets confused because there's a few more equals in the same declaration.)

What you could try, but I'm not sure it would work, is something similar to the Template:!. Make a simple template that only outputs an equal sign (maybe call it ) and use that in the place of equal signs in your URL. If that logic works for pipes in parser functions, it may well work for equals in templates. I've come across this problem once before, and at that time  a link explained it, but not sure where (maybe somewhere here). Anyway, you're right, urls are a problem when passing parameters. It is always a good rule of a thumb to use either a numbered or named parameter, or include it in quotes. If I recall correctly mediawiki strips the quotes automatically, at least for named or numbered parameters.