Tell YC: "Hacker News" needs clean profile URLs | Hacker News Reader

Tell YC: "Hacker News" needs clean profile URLs

4 pointsjonallanharper12 comments

I would personally like to link to my YCombinator profile via: http://news.ycombinator.com/user/{username}

Do you guys agree this would be valuable?

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Nice suggestion, but no, it really doesn't "need" clean URLs.

The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well.

Personally I'm just kind of allergic to question marks.

It's not like it's some massive, bold undertaking. It's one line in an htaccess file.

"... The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well. ..."

And is subject to breakage & link rot if any of the link structure changes. This happened when the "comments" term was replaced by "item" a long way back. So all the links I collected failed until I checked them. For instance try:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3754 (FAIL)

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754 (OK)

Clean URI's are cool. They last a long time and just work ~ http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI These URI's smell funny. Having said that it doesn't really effect the running of the site, indexing or searching and require coding changes. But it will bite you at some time in the future.

I mentioned these type of things a while ago ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671 so I don' think anything is going to change soon.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonallanharper isn't clean enough?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user/jonallanharper is more valuable from a search engine perspective, I think.

that's to assume pg wants search traffic

semantic urls are nifty but not that nifty

He wants people to take pride in their comments/submissions. Knowing your info is easily searchable by your handle influences you to create more valuable content.

for what it's worth, my HN profile pops up within the top 5 google search results

http://news.ycombinator.com/user/{username}.{rss|atom|json}

... would be elegant though, IMO.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alaskamiller

Does this still hold true? I know in the past search engines ignored stuff after the ? but is this still the case? Google certainly doesn't anymore.

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