Re: Request Nova BBS add easier-to-remember search URL links for Usenet article lookups

Retro Guy wrote on Tue, 19 Mar 2024 20:34:21 -0700 :

Have Apache recognize something like:
    https://groups.novabbs.com/news.admin.peering
As a short cut for:
https://www.novabbs.com/computers/article-flat.php?group=news.admin.peering
Make the computer do the work for you with little effort on your part.

 
Yes, it's pretty simple to do with the web server, but if I were to do this
I will be writing changes into the website code. That's how I'm doing other
tasks (rewriting url when groups are moved by admin to another section,
accessing an article by mid, etc.) I prefer the software can handle this
stuff on it's own.

What I like about Grant's suggestion above is his link is the simplest:
 <https://groups.novabbs.com/news.admin.peering>

Which is very similar to the Google Usenet search URL, which was:
 <https://groups.google.com/g/news.admin.peering>

So maybe another suggestion (to copy the Google syntax) could be:
 <https://groups.novabbs.com/g/news.admin.peering>

Optionally, configure a search shortcut in your client where you type
something like the following:
    novabbs news.admin.peering
And have it translate that to:
https://www.novabbs.com/computers/article-flat.php?group=news.admin.peering

 
Good idea.

No big deal but I do not understand Grant's suggestion above.
What's a "search shortcut" and which "client" is Grant talking about?

Don't create thousands of permalinks.  That's a recipe for failure.  If
you don't do something dynamic like mod_rewrite above, at least do
something that's a database lookup.  There are plenty of ways to do this
in many web servers.

 
No need for permalinks, I would just create a link to the article as one
already exists. I would just make that link easy to copy to the clipboard
as I do with mid.

Whew. Good. I wouldn't want you to have to maintain an additional set of
permalinks, so it's nice that you already have the link. It just takes
intelligence to find that link because the only way today to get to it is
via the message-id search option.

Thanks for understanding that the goal is to make it foolproof for dummies.