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I'm working on a website where users can submit items (in this case, proposals). The simplest URL design would be something like website.com/proposal/1, website.com/proposal/2, etc. (perhaps with a slug appended) but I've never seen this done in practice.

Is this URL design really as rare as I think it is and if so, why?

tao_oat
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  • I'm not quite sure what you're asking. But as an example - look at the URL for this website (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24849856/url-design-is-it-bad-practice-to-use-consecutive-urls-for-e-g-blog-posts). It's basically the same thing but stackoverflow uses the title for the question in combination with some numbers instead of just numbers. I don't think it's rare and I don't think it's bad practice. – simeg Jul 20 '14 at 11:15
  • Depends on how "secret" the stuff is at each url and whether information about progress is important and the security model implemented. – Allan S. Hansen Jul 20 '14 at 11:29
  • If the proposals are not supposed to always be public, guessable URLs could be a bad idea. Hashes would perhaps be better in this scenario. But e.g. Launchpad bug reports are consecutively numbered even though some are confidential; unauthorized access is blocked by other means. Incidentally, you will also find this URL pattern in many other bug trackers as well (even though it might sometimes be converted to something else by a rewrite rule; for example, https://bugs.debian.org/123456 gets rewritten to a more-complex URL). – tripleee Jul 20 '14 at 11:34
  • Thank you - I suppose it happens a lot more often than I've noticed! – tao_oat Jul 20 '14 at 12:42

1 Answers1

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This URL design is not uncommon.

It is used, for example, by

But there are various cases when not to use this design, for example

  • when all/some URLs should not be easy to guess (example: YouTube, for unlisted but sharable videos)
  • when URLs should not contain opaque/unneeded parts (example: Wikipedia)
  • when it should be private which URLs/pages were created before/after
  • when it should be private how many URLs/pages of this kind exist
Community
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unor
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