YourName.PaperDemon.com URLs

 Hello PD members. I know one thing that sucks about PD is that you get a lame url like this for your profile page:

http://www.paperdemon.com/profile/52

And that a lot of other sites like DeviantArt have your username as a subdomain:

http://arkillian.deviantart.com

There are a couple of reasons why we don't have it at PD. #1, because I didn't know how to implement dynamic subdomains (but I just learned how to). And #2, our username restrictions here are different. Firstly, we allow spaces and all sorts of special characters in our usernames that would not be permitted in a URL.

So now that problem #1 is out of the way, how do we solve #2?

Solution idea 1
My thought was to handle it similar to myspace. Everyone by default will be some number like 285032.paperdemon.com until you setup your url. Your URL will not necessarily be the same as your username. So your username could be "Jimmy Rox" but your URL could be cooljimmy.paperdemon.com.
The problem with this though is that someone could end up registering their URL as the same thing as someone elses username. So lets say Arkillian was late to find out about the whole URL thing and someone else snagged the URL arkillian.paperdemon.com.

Solution idea 2
I could run some sort of script that strips out any special characters in everyone's username and then that result would be your new url. So "Jimmy Rox" would then become "jimmyrox.paperdemon.com." Also if I take this approach I actually would like our usernames to be updated to not have special characters. new users who sign up would not be able to add spaces and other special characters.  The good thing about this is that your url will be consistant with your username keeping others from snagging your url. The down side is you are stuck with whatever your username is. But hey, its better than paperdemon.com/profile/268447

Does anyone have any opinions on this or ideas for other solutions?

The way I've seen it done on other sites is to replace some of the disallowed characters with some other character that is allowed. When Livejournal went to the subdomain system, someone called user_name would end up with the URL user-name.livejournal.com . They replaced the underscore with a dash.

How many different characters are allowed in Paperdemon usernames that would not be allowed in URLs?

either way is fine by me, I'm always a fan of shorter urls

I like shorter names- I could advertise PD alot better with it ^^ I'm not good at coding though, so I wouldn't know other methods of doing it thoguh ...

On Jun 17, 2008 7:37 pm, Indefatigable42 said:

This is an interesting idea!

On Jun 17, 2008 7:37 pm, Indefatigable42 said:

We allow almost everything. asterisks, underscores, spaces, periods, parenthesis, pluses. Some people even have § and Æ.

I think perhaps what we should do is have everyone update their username to something url safe and use that same name for the url. So if you have a username that has spaces or special characters in it (anything that isn't a letter, number, or dash) then you have to update your username. Until you do, you'd just have somenumber.paperdemon.com as your url.

How does that sound? It wouldn't be too hard to force everyone to update their usernames. We can do it the same way we started forcing birthday inputs. As soon as you attempted to log in you had to choose a new username and you couldn't complete the login process until you did.

By the way, I forgot to mention that we won't be able to start having these custom urls right away. There are a few other problems that I'll need to sort out. Mostly issues with any html links referencing root as slash (as in <a href="/somepage.php"> since they'll then be broken if they appear on somepage.paperdemon.com. I'll have to sort that out later.

I like solution no. 2. Mostly cause I have no special chars in my username anyway, and it will be easier to give my family members the address for my gallery.

Sounds like a great idea to me. I know zip about coding so whatever you feel is best for the site I'll trust you

Another way would be keeping the current system, but just replacing the ID factor with user-names. Sure, it would still be kind of long, but I think that'd cut down on the back-end work a bit. (I dunno how much you'd actually have to do.)

On Jun 17, 2008 8:16 pm, BogusRed said:

Hmmm…

Not sure if this would work, but you could use… Blah. I forget. Is it the <base> tag?

Set the base for URLs to http://www.paperdemon.com, and then for user-name.paperdemon.com pages, include that prefix. (That's probably a horrible mis-use of that word.)

Am I just being dense and stating the obvious, or stating something that would totally not work?

I'd have to fix all urls from /somepage.php to http://www.paperdemon.com/somepage.php

It wouldn't be hard to do. It would just take a lot of time. I'll probably store http://www.paperdemon.com/ in a variable and put it before all of the urls.

I definitely think choice #2 is the way to go.  If it IS possible to replace special characters with characters that are allowed, that would be awesome, but it looks like with as many special characters as are allowed, that would be a lot of extra time in itself.

Anyhow - I think our usernames should be domain names.  As an afterthought - it would make it easier for us mods to find people, too.    That list for sorting alphabetically is getting really really long.

seems like most agree #2 or a variant of #2 is the way to go. Which is cool with me. I think it would be easier to implement.

If we do go with #2, I want everyone's usernames to be updated as well to be consistant with the url. I'll figure out some sort of algorithm for how to deal with special characters. Or I could just manually change those with funky usernames. That might be what I end up doing just to ensure no one ends up with a stupid username.

I'll likely make the username updates soon and change the signup process to only permit url safe characters. the actual setup of the urls themselves will be a few months off as I need to do a lot of prep for it.

I plan to spend some time rewriting all of the code that handles user accounts and profiles. The code is so archaic. It's currently the oldest most disorganized code on PD. Probably something like 4 years old. It needs to be rewritten from the ground up. I'd also like to use it for other projects so it will need to be more exportable.

I like the idea...  I also like shorter urls. 

On Jun 17, 2008 3:48 pm, BogusRed said:

I'm fine with either way, as long as I get to keep the dash in my username.

Having a friendlier URL here would make it easier to direct people to my PaperDemon account. Right now, I have to tell them my username and let them search, or else give them my ID number... which is annoying.

Thanks for considering this!