Thank you again Dhrup. I understand. We'll just have to establish and issue manual forwarding links to those groups that want to promote heavily and need a smaller, more effective url. We'll offer it as a special benefit for our best participants. Thanks again.

heh heh u just gave me an idea !!!
if you have a small list of groups you want to "promote" then
rewrite on just their URLs
e.g.
RewriteRule   ^Elggalaxy$ /elggalaxy    pg/groups/52477/hackers-elggalaxy/
and so on...
that will work - because you can manually look up your few "special" groups ;-)

( that is what you meant by "manually forward" ? )

Hmm, that's an idea, but I'm afraid our list will be way long for that. We'll just write a page that forwards. Then copy and paste with the new page for each group that we offer the benefit to. That way we're unlimited and can even make the group name more efficient. For example, if the group was John Smith Plumbing, it would normally convert to www.oursite.com/john-smith-plumbing, but we could then write it as www.oursite.com/jsp - if the group liked that. Only problem is that it's a manual create - but then again it gives us a chance to communicate with the group and potentially sell them some ads. Two birds with one stone.

Just added this and it works perfectly. This is going to be a very good attribute for our site.

Thanks a million.

@woody
who you thx and
what worked ?
koorious to know wot u r coding ???

Is there a magic trick to this coz it is not working for me:

Line 118 #RewriteBase /
Line 119
Line 120 RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9]+)$ pg\/profile\/$1
Line 121 RewriteRule ^action\/([A-Za-z\_\-\/]+)$ engine/handlers/action_handler.php?action=$1

Just the simple stuff of being able to create simple links to a person's profile:

www.southamerica.me/woodward

without all the pg/profile/ folders in the middle.

Goofers: I'll look for the section in my file to do a copy paste here.

This is it:

#
#RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ pg/profile/$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ pg/profile/$1
RewriteRule ^action\/([A-Za-z\_\-\/]+)$ engine/handlers/action_handler.php?action=$1

It's not my coding. It's from Cim @ Demyx.com (177 days ago) further up this thread who made the change.

oh yes I have it set in the htaccess it's just not working for me.  I still have the long URL