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Proposal: Human-readable profile URLs
Would it be possible to have human-readable profile URLs instead of numbers?
e.g. https://meta.codidact.com/users/da5nsy or https://meta.codidact.com/users/@da5nsy rather than https://meta.codidact.com/users/64176
2 answers
User names don't have to be unique (and platforms that require uniqueness tend to frustrate people who end up being Mike792 or whatever), so we need the numbers. Given that we need to include the number, we went for the shortest URL that uniquely identifies the user. Would it help if we added the name to the end, such as users/64176/da5nsy?
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In addition to the uniqueness issue, there is also the compatibility issue. Usernames can include characters that are invalid in URLs. Those characters would need to be replaced with hexadecimal codes or arbitrary replacements, and either solution would result in a different URL and affect readability.
Users can also change their user name (Somewhere Else this is frequently done to protest various management actions or as a response to world events), which would invalidate a saved name-based URL. An ID # based URL will work as long as the user is active.
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