fools-pyrite

computer toucher; RPG enjoyer


A common pattern across most sites with “posts” is that the timestamp of the post is also the way to permalink to the post. This is true for Cohost, Twitter, Facebook (I think) phpBB (I think), etc

Are all these sites inheriting from a single ancestor’s decision? And either way, why make that the permalink?


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in reply to @fools-pyrite's post:

in our case it's not the timestamp (yet), it's a globally incrementing post ID. other sites use a number based on the timestamp because doing a globally incrementing post ID is impractical when you have 1,000 computers all competing for IDs.

and the answer is that making it something the poster has control over (e.g. through the post title) either results in the poster being able to break the link by accident at any time or requires you to come up with some elaborate system of redirects so that links don't break if they change the title