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Comment by torh | Hacker News Reader

Not that long ago I clicked on a link that Microsoft provided somewhere in Windows -- could have been the event log, I don't remember. I do remember it was for a specific support article, but it ended up at a generic landing page for something. I am not talking about a link from Windows 95, it must have been Windows 10. But regardless, it is all gone. Then again, it probably wasn't a cool URL to begin with.

It's amazingly many news sites that also seem to scrub their URLs every time they do a redesign. Also uncool.

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Got an MX4 yesterday and it has a printed card with "Go to logitech.com/mx to get started" resulting in a "Forbidden" error page. This product hasn't even been out for a year!

Might have been an overeager packaging designer that printed that and then filed a ticket for someone to set up the redirect and that ticket is still in the person's queue.

Or it's something about your own connection. Maybe an ad blocker? For me, the redirect works:

    $ curl -IL logitech.com/mx 2>/dev/null | grep http
    Location: https://logitech.com:443/mx
    location: https://www.logitech.com:443/mx
    location: https://www.logitech.com/en-ca/mx.html

(I have the Mechanical Mini keyboard and the 3S Anywhere mouse; I like the MX product line.)

I'm currently in Europe and forgot my Unimouse, hence the purchase. I just tried on 5G and get a Forbidden there as well, open the VPN back to US and then the URL works. I see "en-ca" in your redirec there so likely they don't have a default/fallback redirect. The MX4 is nice but damn if it isn't the heaviest mouse I've pushed around a tabletop.

MX4 finally got me looking elsewhere until I stumbled upon this: https://ergodriven.com/products/the-vertical-handshake-mouse

I got it specifically because they had a mini rant about the weight of switches that other vertical mice use, and while I couldn't tell if that was a real problem, that's the kind of mentality I used to ascribe to Logitech.

The MX4 is clearly marketing logic. The haptic feature adds nothing of note, and 100% feels like their marketing people got to preempt the core goal of making an ergonomic mouse so they could have a headline.

I'm a big fan of the Zowie EC mice. Basically (egonomically) a clone of ye old Microsoft Intellimouse (From the late 90s/early 2000s when MS actually made good hardware), except with modern guts and available in 3 sizes. For my hand the most comfortable mice every created.

The hand is very off putting, should have hired a better hand model. Also real infomercial vibes, the way the posture completely changes between flat and vertical.

If no hand model is what's letting them sell me a high quality mouse for $45 in a two pack... I'll take whatever hands they can get

Jeez that's a heck of a redirect chain. The :443 is an odd choice no? And the redirect to https://domain before https://www.domain. There are even two more for me. Also... inconsistent casing for the Location header? Different parts of the server stack I suppose.

    Location: https://logitech.com:443/mx
    location: https://www.logitech.com:443/mx
    location: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/mx.html
    location: https://www.logitech.com/discover/c/master-series
    location: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/discover/c/master-series.html

443 is just the default https port, so not really? It doesn't add anything as browsers use that port by default when the scheme is https.

Sure, it just seems odd to specify it. I haven't seen that in a link in a long time. I don't usually snoop Location redirect chains in my browser though, so maybe it's more common than I think.

http:// → https:// → https://www. is actually the recommended technique, because it lets an HTTP-Strict-Transport-Security subdomains directive work.

But the rest could have been flattened into the second redirect.

That URL works for me. It must be an issue on your end.

Seems to be country/geoip dependent.

Average time of url is 5 years.

Therefore I try to make a local copy of a document that I link to.

There a plugin for Firefox that can check bookmarked links. You will be surprised how they vanish pretty fast…

Very uncool; Microsoft even uses an URL shortener for most of their links (from windows etc) so that they can theoretically change where the user ends up at if the original page is replaced for whatever reason.

But they shouldn't. Microsoft especially should make all of their documentation pages plain static HTML pages and keep them available forever.

But also, any Windows documentation can live offline in the OS itself. At least nowadays, I get how in the windows 98 / XP era they wanted to reduce disk usage.

Microsoft is so careful about making sure they only use the URL forwarder (go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkId=) in their products but then at some point decided "oh this is too hard let's just set most of the IDs to point at the Microsoft support home page" (support.microsoft.com). Not even Windows, all of Microsoft!

The Event Log fwlinks still append the `ProdName=MicrosoftWindowsOperatingSystem` to the URL and the Microsoft Support homepage just ignores them helpfully asking "What do you need help with today?" and putting Windows on the second row of a 5 column grid.

Open the Event Viewer, click on an event and click the blue "Event Log Online Help" hyperlink at the bottom. I'll be willing to bet it won't matter what event you pick, you'll still end up at the Microsoft Support homepage.

Others take you on a roundabout journey to the Microsoft homepage.

  > GET /fwlink/?LinkId=52884 HTTP/1.1
  < Location: https://www.microsoft.com/products/ee/transform.aspx?[snip]
  > GET /products/ee/transform.aspx?[snip] HTTP/2
  < location: https://www.microsoft.com/?[snip]

If you click the Help question mark in Explorer you end up at a Bing search page for the query "get help with file explorer in windows". I thought at one point they had specialised cards shown above the results for these queries but today it's just a generic Bing results page.

  > GET /fwlink/?LinkId=528884 HTTP/1.1
  < Location: https://www.bing.com/search?q=get+help+with+file+explorer+in+windows&filters=guid:%224026535-en-dia%22%20lang:%22en%22&form=S00028

Microsoft has a terrible habit of doing that. KB's used to have a predicable URL, they may again, but they keep changing them. Or any of their docs really. It's terrible as those URL's end up in other documents to be killed. This is not really an enterprise friendly way of supporting customers.

Yeah, I always wondered how one of the wealthiest companies on earth could be so poor in linking to their own documentation.

Then I realized that they have a galaxy of consultants and experts that effectively make a living by keeping on top of all issues and fixing them for a fee. So there is little incentive for them to actually be user-friendly: as long as they are "partner friendly" with timely material, that's good enough.

They are not alone in this, btw - pretty much all major platform providers do this, one way or the other.

Particularly since one of their flagship products is a CMS that solves that problem and lets you move documents around without breaking links

I've given up because half the help links in the control panel leads to a bing search without any helpful results at all

I bought an air conditioner last year, some wal-mart “smart” AC that was affordable (we had to get three for the new house we moved in to so budget was a big concern) and it has a QR code for the companion app. I finally got around to getting the app this summer and lo and behold, it’s a dead link. Yay.

Even if the link isn't dead, every one of those companion apps will be dead long before the hardware dies because the companies won't pay a developer and the apple developer fee forever.

Mailing list archive software is a constant rug pull: today you link to a post about something relevant, and next month the link goes to a different message about a different subject.

There is no financial incentive for most companies to maintain extremely old URLs. There is no large visible cost known to the project manager at a company who chooses to migrate to a different CMS.

A common solution is to create placeholders at the old URLs with permanent redirects to the new URLs, but that doesn't fix all of the old hyperlinks, so it becomes extremely expensive to maintain backwards compatibility after 2 or more CMS changes.

Entropy

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