Nurphy

Neil: Hi @Paul. The asterisk issue is a real conundrum. We originally decided use * as a prefix in conversation URLs so that we can have both the users (http://Nurphy.com/Paul), and the conversations (http://Nurphy.com/*feedbk) at the root of the Nurphy domain name.

However, it turns out that 'auto-linking' methods across many popular sites & web technologies (Twitter, WordPress, Ruby on Rails) don't consider this to be a valid URL char, and will break a URL as soon as they hit an asterisk. This is despite the fact that http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt suggests the * is valid and doesn't need encoding.

Do we encourage all these popular web services, clients, and technologies to fix their auto-linking methods (seems like a tall order), or do we remove the asterisk and make the best decision (considering the evidence available) on a slightly tweaked URL scheme?

paul: Not easy @Neil. The Twitter issue is further complicated by the fact that several of the popular clients also fail to link these URLs. Interestingly the default Rails implementation does auto-link them as expected, so I assume Twitter are doing their own thing as part of their @ reply handling.

ryantownsend: Couldn't you setup your own Nurphy URL shortening service, then generate a url, i.e. nurp.hy/w67urh that then forwards (or even masks) to nurphy.com/c/w67urh that way even if people take the full URL, it's only 1 more character than usual, and you could display a 'link to this conversation' link at the top of the conversation page.

Your only issue is the quick linking to other conversations, where you just prefix the code by an asterisk. However I'd imagine people could grasp that they want to just put *<last_part_of_url_here>.

Neil: @ryantownsend, that's nice idea! Yes, we're thinking the same thing; it shouldn't be too difficult to remember to include the * in front of the last section of the URL, especially when many Nurphy users are accustomed to doing the same thing with @ your_name in other apps.