if you have topics with spaces in them, the respective stories have URLs with spaces in them, which have to be encoded. antville does this properly with "%20", but some inferior search engines convert them to "+" signs, resulting in a 404 when the user wants to follow the link.

maybe the server can be told to detect such faulty URLs and rewrite them or just redirect to the proper location? this would be trivial to do in the apache conf, but even nicer if antville did it, so everyone who downloads antville automatically gets this feature.

that's wrong. for quite a long time now the name of the topic is not anymore included in the url of a story and actually the search-engine didn't convert the url but antville (resp. helma) generates urls with spaces encoded as '+' (just in some macros this was overridden with a temporary workaround). this will be fixed.