Unfortunately this isn't that easy. Simply removing this at this point is a break in b/c for the routing. Yes, the query parameter there has been wrong and it has been wrong for years, also already in Joomla 3, but simply removing it means lots of errors in the google search console, so we should carefully consider how to handle this. I've been thinking about this for a long time already and don't have a satisfying solution for this. The problem is that we also need the information about the category for URLs without IDs. The way the PR is now, it can't be merged unfortunately.

@Hackwar Maybe I misunderstand something, or I lack some knowledge, but how can this PR be a b/c break or make problems in Google search if this PR reverts a change which was made in 5.3-dev to what we have in 5.2?

@heelc29 I allowed myself to update your branch to the latest changes in 5.3-dev and have resolved conflicts.

Now the system tests are failing at the last test:

1) Test in frontend that the contact site router
       can process contact with legacy routing:
     AssertionError:
       expected 'http://localhost/cmysql/index.php/component/contact/contact/38-test-contact-router-test-contact-router'
       to match /\/index.php\/component\/contact\/contact\/38-test-contact-router$/
      at __webpack_modules__</</overrideChaiAsserts/ (http://localhost/__cypress/runner/cypress_runner.js:139310:25)
      at overwritingMethodWrapper (http://localhost/__cypress/runner/cypress_runner.js:79011:33)
      at  (webpack://joomla/./tests/System/integration/site/components/com_contact/Router.cy.js:172:44)

It seems the "test-contact-router" is appended 2 times in the URL.

@richard67 I introduced a new rule which fixed URLs which didn't contain the necessary information, here: It adds the catid. This happens if you don't provide a catid when generating the URL. But by default all URLs generated by the core already have the catid and this PR all of a sudden removes those catids again. While this works okay when using IDs, URLs with IDs disabled will not be able to discover the right article.

@richard67 I introduced a new rule which fixed URLs which didn't contain the necessary information, here: It adds the catid. This happens if you don't provide a catid when generating the URL. But by default all URLs generated by the core already have the catid and this PR all of a sudden removes those catids again. While this works okay when using IDs, URLs with IDs disabled will not be able to discover the right article.

@Hackwar Could you advise then how else we could get rid of the workarounds in the unit tests?