4 ms·

So, not to risk showing me a link again, they prefer to show me nothing at all? That's a pretty awful tradeoff.

• maxerickson 13y ago
  It's not about showing you the link or not, it's the implementation leaking out. A bunch of different user actions generate new fnids (one place you see them is in the 'more' urls) and there is only space set aside on the server for some limited number of them.
• BrindsleyQuives 13y ago
  ^^ What s/he said. I appreciate that the karma system and voting introduces a lot more complexity behind the scenes with regard to how the top stories are ordered than the simple "newest" stuff on top approach of most news or blog sites. But I don't see why that is allowed to 'break' the display. Irrespective of how you select your records from the database, it's fairly basic practice to paginate the results with some kind of begin=1&end=50 URL appending. Also the 'expired link' page doesn't even display a link back to the homepage. So you have to either use your browser's back button [unless that link has also now expired], or manually edit the address bar URL, to get some content loading again. My original question was of the type "Is this really badly designed, or am I missing something really clever?". I think I have the answer now.