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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

So why is there no problem with vote/flag/vouche on HN being GET endpoints?

Then that does not conform to the HTTP spec. GET endpoints must be safe, idempotent, cachable. Opening up a site to cases were web crawlers/scrapers may wreak havoc.

There is, it's bad. Luckily votes aren't very crucial.

Votes are crucial. HN goes to great lengths to prevent votes that do not stem from real user intent.

See this post for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761897

Quotes:

"Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years"

"I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902

Indeed, user embedded pictures can fire GET requests while can not make POST requests. But this is not a problem if you don't allow users to embed pictures, or you authenticate the GET request somehow. Anyway GET requests are just fine.

The same would have worked with a POST endpoint.

The story url only would have to point to a web page that creates the upvote post request via JS.

That runs into CORS protections though.

CORS is a lot less strict around GET as it is supposed to be safe.

Nope, it would not have been prevented by CORS.

CORS prevents reading from a resource, not from sending the request.

If you find that surprising, think about that the JS could also have for example created a form with the vote page as the target and clicked on the submit button. All completely unrelated to CORS.

> CORS prevents reading from a resource

CORS does nothing of the sort. It does the exact opposite – it’s explicitly designed to allow reading a resource, where the SOP would ordinarily deny it.

Even mdn calls it "violating the CORS security rules" instead of SOP rules: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/COR...

Anyway, this is lame low effort trolling for some unknown purpose. Stop it.

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