If you renamed your project and published it again, its web address changed with it, and the old address no longer opens the project. UNI does not redirect an old project address to a new one, so a link you shared earlier stops working the moment you publish under a different title. The project is not gone and nothing in it was lost. Only its address moved.
The address is rebuilt from your title and description at every publish
A project's address is not something you choose. It is generated from the project's title followed by the opening of its description, and the result is cut at 40 characters. A project that has never been published has no address at all.
Two things follow from that:
- Editing does not move the address. Publishing does. The address is recalculated when a version is published, not when it is saved. You can rewrite the title as often as you like while the version is still unpublished.
- Only the first 40 characters decide it. If your edit falls past that cut, the recalculated address comes out identical and every existing link keeps working. Rewriting the later part of a long description is safe. Changing the opening words of the title is not, because the title sits at the front.
If the recalculated address is already held by another project, a number is added to the end of it.
Your views, likes and comments are not affected
Everything attached to the project stays attached: views, likes, comments, ratings, followers, team members, and any competition entry it was submitted to. It is the same project at a new address, not a new project, so no count resets and nothing needs to be rebuilt.
What breaks is inbound links only, and they break quietly. A CV, an email, a portfolio page or a post elsewhere will keep pointing at an address that no longer resolves, and nobody is notified. Search engines that indexed the old address will also keep sending people there until they crawl the project again.
You can recover the old address if no one else has taken it
The address is recalculated from the current text every time, which means it is reproducible. Restore the title and the opening of the description to exactly the wording they had when the old link worked, then publish again. The address is computed from the same text and comes out as the same string.
The one condition is that no other project claimed that address while yours was elsewhere. If one did, yours comes back with a number appended, which is a different link. There is no way for support staff to hand an address back to you or to point the old one at the new one.
Projects, journals and publications each behave differently
If you have published more than one kind of content on UNI, do not carry an assumption across from one to another.
- Projects recalculate the address at every publish, which is what this page describes.
- Journals fix the address at first publish and never change it again, so renaming a journal later leaves its link alone. See Your journal's web address is fixed at publish.
- Publications recalculate the address on every save made while the publication is published, so a publication's link is the least stable of the three.
What to do about it
- Settle the title before you share the link widely. This is the only reliable protection.
- If the link is already out and you have changed the title, choose between keeping the new title and accepting the broken link, or restoring the old wording to get the old address back.
- Update the link wherever you control the destination: your portfolio, your profile links, a CV you can re-upload, anything you can edit.
- Before you republish after a rename, copy the new address from the project page so you have it to hand.