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Shouldn't there be some tradeoffs? Say I sign up with service x with the name y. My URL is www.x.com/users/y. Years later I delete my account. Someone else sig
by nommm-nommm 10y ago
Shouldn't there be some tradeoffs?
Say I sign up with service x with the name y. My URL is www.x.com/users/y. Years later I delete my account. Someone else signs up with the name y. Now www.x.com/users/y goes to someone else's resources. The old URL is broken.
The only way to prevent this is either give the user a url (that they will want to share) that is not meaningful or disallow anybody to sign up with a name that was ever in use and names are a resource that is very limited.
Neither seems ideal. I do agree on principal that URLS shouldn't change, though.
Hotmail actually has this problem, or at least they used to. They delete accounts that are inactive for a long time and someone else can sign up with that name. The new person can get email addressed to the previous owner.
- krapp 10y ago>Now www.x.com/users/y goes to someone else's resources. The old URL is broken. The URL isn't broken if it just points to a different resource.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoI'd rather it broke. If someone linked to the old URL, describing it as "the profile page of an international child murderer", and I later inherited that URL by signing up for the service, I wouldn't be too pleased. The "y" example is confusingly simplistic; the site already has a "can't use duplicate usernames" rule, so 404'ing the original URL isn't 'worse' for anyone than if the original user didn't delete their account.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoSure not technically broken, it is semantically broken as the meaning has changed.
- zeveb 10y agoThe service should not reuse your username for someone else. Or, perhaps, it should not reuse your user ID, and offer a username resolution service?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y agoWhat this is about is content that gets moved to different addresses. Recycling addresses isn't that good either, but also not that bad. What is really bad is when there is some document/resource/content that is linked to by others (be it in other web pages or in bookmarks), and then that document changing its address, as all those references now don't point to the document anymore, even though the document actually still is available somewhere. An address being reused for something different isn't really all that much worse than the existing references leading to a 404. But either of those is bad if the original content is still available somewhere.