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Comment by kiyoto | Hacker News Reader

When I submitted http://www.facebook.com, it redirected me back to the previous outage link because the URL is the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914905

I added a random URL string to have HN recognize this as a new entry. Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?

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> Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?

It would be a much much better idea if people stopped posting "X IS DOWN!!!!" submissions.

I agree that it is not the most intellectually interesting. But HN, for better and worse, has evolved to be one of the front pages of the Internet (at least for certain demographics), and some people do come here for transient, immediate information. In that sense, I don't think it is entirely useless.

Also, sometimes "X is down" type of submissions can start conversations interesting in their own right in the comment section.

Maybe they should be limited to a single account? Currently there are at least eight threads about FB.

And isn't the interesting discussion during the post-mortem?

I mostly agree, but I find it vaguely interesting that a service as large and distributed can still have a "down for significant numbers of people"-type event.

How necessary are those posts though? A link to a site that is down is practically useless. A link to a blog post about the current status or a post mortem is very useful.

According to the HN guidelines[0], it seems that it would be more appropriate to write a blog entry regarding the outage and link to that, rather than to link to the site experiencing the outage at the time. Providing a link to a non-functional site is itself of no value, after all.

Also, while not stated in the guidelines, I imagine a text submission would also be appropriate for this sort of situation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Definitely sounds like a good idea. Man, there are so many improvements I wish HN would make, but everytime I see a good idea, it gets completely ignored, downvoted into oblivion, or removed by the mods.

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