In the context of PHP forum development, what best practices should be followed when implementing a pagination feature to avoid issues like the one described in the thread?

Issue: The issue described in the thread is that when navigating through the pages of the forum, the pagination links do not maintain the current search query parameters, resulting in users losing their search filters when moving to the next page. Solution: To fix this issue, the pagination links should include the current search query parameters in their URLs so that users' search filters are preserved when navigating through the pages. Code snippet:

// Get current search query parameters
$searchParams = http_build_query($_GET);

// Display pagination links with current search query parameters
echo '<a href="?page=1&' . $searchParams . '">First</a>';

for ($i = 1; $i <= $totalPages; $i++) {
    echo '<a href="?page=' . $i . '&' . $searchParams . '">' . $i . '</a>';
}

echo '<a href="?page=' . $totalPages . '&' . $searchParams . '">Last</a>';