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User page url like twitter or facebook?

+3 votes
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in Q2A Core by

@Scott, @pupi1985, Is it possible to make Q2A user page like twitter or facebook....like twitter.com/username or facebook.com/username. currently Q2A user page is q2asite.com/users/username.

If urls like fb or twitter are possible then it will be be easy for users to share their account details on other sites, they may also feel good to claim good username url.....if some Q2A site becomes very popular like stackoverflow then people will feel proud to list that kind of url on their personal site or other social profile etc.

In future we can think about verified profiles also, like twitter or fb. This will help to encourage users to take more part in QA site.

1 Answer

+1 vote
by

Yes, it is possible (everything is, actually). I wouldn't do that, though.

These are the reasons:

  • A Q&A site should care more about questions than users. Otherwise, it would be a social network rather than a Q&A site. So having yoursite.com/<question-id> makes much more sense to me than yoursite.com/questions/<question-id>
  • I don't think anyone has any issue with yoursite.com/users/<user-id>. If it is too long it can be shortened to yoursite.com/u/<user-id> (this is currently possible)
  • You mentioned StackOverflow. They have this kind of user URL stackoverflow.com/users/<user-id>/<user-name> which is very long compared to the one in Q2A. Anyway, the <user-name> seems to be optional in practice so you share just the user id
  • StackOverflow question links have this URL structure stackoverflow.com/questions/<question-id>. Despite the length of the URL they are still the #1 site
  • Assuming your suggestion had been: "Do not allow usernames to be only numbers and when in this structure yoursite.com/<input> , <input> is an integer greater than 0 then redirect to a question, otherwise, redirect to a user profile corresponding to that value". I still believe this would complicate things unnecessarily and it won't be so much clear for the user if he is linking to a question or to a user
  • Considering that was a solution to the underlying issue you mentioned in your question, which was "it will be be easy for users to share their account details on other sites" maybe it would be better to just create a plugin to ease sharing your profile or maybe, as StackOverflow has, to share a piece of HTML code with your avatar, points and stuff (they call it flare):
Show 5 previous comments
by
@ pupi1985, yes, discussion turned into feature request :) let us discuss that in separate thread.

Let us leave Q2A user profile page as is. May be you can add solution to create url like yoursite.com/u/<user-id>, just in case someone is interested in short url.

I will start new thread for user profile features, let us get some ideas from all.

Thanks!
by
@ pupi1985, Could you please add solution to create url like yoursite.com/u/<user-id> or yoursite.com/profile/<user-id>, just in case someone is interested in short url.
by
Well, I can not "add"/merge a solution. Only Scott can. I can write a whole approach but, if it doesn't get merged, then it means I've spent many hours of my life for nothing (literally, because I'm not being paid for doing so). The change is too radical which lowers the chance of being merged. So I prefer Scott to take a look at it.

BTW, this isn't new at all and I've already been involved in a discussion about it 2 years ago: https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/issues/209
by
Ok, no problem. There are many other important features required now than this.
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