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I have an auto redirector that changes www. to old. It links this URL to this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn/comments/vault/iwtl_how_to_not_give_

• CameronNemo 6y ago
  Odd? That post just got randomly assigned the short URL of "vault". These are usually short random alphanumeric ascii. Not so weird to me
  • bzb3 6y ago
    They are not random. They are consecutive numbers in base36.
    • ultrarunner 6y ago
      I recently saw it mentioned that another site's URL ids were consecutive numbers in base 52, and then base 36 here. I was previously only aware of the use of base 64, so my interest was piqued — why choose one over the other? It looks like the reason is that in base 36 information can be encoded in the 26 characters of the alphabet plus 10 numeric characters. In base 52 you can use the same, but case-sensitive and possibly without vowels. This makes it work nicely in URLs. I was going to ask the significance but thought I'd post what I found instead.
    • CameronNemo 6y ago
      Oh so that is what they meant by odd! The base36 number is odd (52574321 in decimal). https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vault+base36+to+decimal&t=ffab&ia=answer https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vault+base36+to+decimal&t=ffab&ia=...
• coronadisaster 6y ago
  I redirect www. to ns. And the same happened to me... That leads me to believe that old. and ns. won't be there for much longer.