4 ms·
Reserved-usernames: Usernames to prevent url collision with resource paths
- _kst_ 9y agoThe CSV version (with one field per line) is identical to the plain text version.
- soneil 9y agoInteresting. I assumed it was just a generic parser, and the url fragments don’t contain anything that’d require any effort - but adding quoting, commas, tabs resulted in identical output too.
- djsumdog 9y agoI'm confused. What is the purpose for this? Is this for sites that have exmaple.com/username so you know ahead of time what paths you most likely want to reserve? Seems silly. You should either put users at example.com/user/{username} or you should put all non-user profiles under a reserved base like example.com/res/settings.
- ljoshua 9y agoTwitter, for example, will place the username at the first level (twitter.com/username). Most of the other interactions occur under a small group of other addresses, such as /i/ and /settings/. However, I can still see this being a helpful resource so that you don't have to think about all possibilities from the outset.
- WorldMaker 9y agoSome of these are also usernames that a user might use to impersonate being a part of your organization: administrator, contact_us, news, et al. That can help stop some particularly egregious social engineering attacks.
- Aloha 9y agoI guess if you have usernames in a shared namespace with system components this'd make sense - it's not something I'd consider a feature. consider: website.org/aloha website.org/contact website.org/u/aloha website.org/users/aloha users.website.org/aloha u.website.org/aloha aloha.website.org with the first two examples, yes, there is a potential for collision - so you'd want something like this. I consider the next four examples to be best - the final example I consider potentially administratively painful depending on implementation.
- 33degrees 9y agoHaving usernames as subdomains is relatively common, and it does seem like this list has that use case in mind (see the variations on www)
- WorldMaker 9y agoDon't forget the ancient classic: website.org/~aloha Mastodon's interesting approach: website.org/@aloha
- Aloha 9y agoyeah, I neglected those. I still use ~ on a couple web servers I administer, easy way for me to give people a sandbox attached to their user.
- adambrenecki 9y agoI agree. Even if you think /user/ or /res/ is too long or unsightly, you could have shorter prefixes like (in an example.com/username system) example.com/.settings or example.com/_settings, or (in an example.com/settings system) example.com/@username or example.com/~username. That said, it might still be a good idea to blacklist these anyway, as you might end up with someone registering the username 'reset-password' (which isn't on this list yet) trying to phish your users, or 'support' trying to masquerade as your support, depending on what your app does.
- twhb 9y agoCertainly doing this is introducing technical challenges easily avoided. But it’s also a win for reading, typing, and remembering URLs. Don’t confuse back-end elegance with elegance in communication with humans.
- everdev 9y agoI could see a profanity list being more useful. How many people really try to register with the username "projects"? As other people have mentioned, namespaces for user URLs solves this better.
- unquietcode 9y agoOr: Why you should not put things like usernames at the top level of your domain. sheesh...
- katastic 9y agoLook at reddit. reddit.com/r/subreddit reddit.com/user/my_user_name (Why not u? I don't know.) Pretty straight forward. There are also ones like subreddit statistics and they're all... after the name. reddit.com/r/subreddit/about/traffic (Note: Public viewable stats are only turned on if the mods turn it on.) [edit] Wait. Reddit removed user access site-wide to those pages? Morons. Well, the URL point still stands.
- theoctopus 9y agoOddly reddit.com/u/foo does work, but it just redirects to reddit.com/user/foo
- nikolay 9y agoThere used to be sane times where usernames were prefixed by a tilde in profile URLs...