Removing the Category ID from article Url

Question

Joomla 3.7(?) to 3.10.5 Legacy router issue fix

So, our site articles' urls needed the category id to be removed (only, not the article id, as removing both causes a 404).

Here is the solution that worked for me, on Joomla 3.10.5, but it might be the same from 3.7 up (If not fixed in 4.0).

Legacy router - path: @www/components/com_content/helpers/legacyrouter.php

Hacking the legacy router, and deactivate appending the category id to the segments array by commenting out line 199 in the legacy router and replacing it like this:

//if (!$advanced && count($array))
if (false)

Tried these solutions Defaulting $advanced to 1 and more, and other solutions in these links:

• https://vincentping.com/en/remove-category-article-id-from-url-in-joomla-3.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26168517/get-rid-of-id-category-and-article-from-url-joomla-3-3-3-4-3-5 ... did not work for me:

You can see the result here: https://new.ac-news.org (under construction)

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As hacking the legacy router was a last resort not recommended solution:

• Was there a better way to do this?
• Should I provide my .htaccess code and the list of plugins I used to try and fix this properly?

Thank you