Confused by Pretty Url behavior

[jonsully]

Not intending to resurrect the dead here, but this topic gets a good amount of SEO hits and I want to make sure folks coming around get the info they’re looking for:

Pretty URLs, URL Routing, and Trailing-Slashes

Greetings I feel like this post may be most pertinent for @fool since this topic’s been handled a number of times here on The Community (by him and others) but I’m looking to clarify implementation details and strongly urge some extended documentation and/or UI changes. The “Pretty URLs” check-box has global routing side effects that are un-documented (as far as I can tell) and un-beholden to the “Disable Asset Optimization” flag, meaning that the “Pretty URLs” checkbox has side effe…