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bowserbros Since: May, 2014
2022-12-28 11:59:56

"Doesn't achieve anything meaningful" is a bit inaccurate: by using the URL with less characters, it reduces the risk of the page hitting the "too long" threshold (at which point the page becomes difficult to edit without massive slowdowns or outright browser crashes). I also don't know if there was any sitewide decision about this, but I get the feeling that jfk002 is doing this as a precaution, albeit one that is most likely unilateral.

Be kind.
mlsmithca (Edited uphill both ways)
2022-12-28 12:08:02

Regarding the argument about preventing the pages hitting the "too long" threshold, they've been doing this on, by now, several hundred pages, almost all of which have nowhere near enough examples to be close to the "too long" threshold. It doesn't seem worthwhile to do that on any but the longest pages, and even then, it's just staving off the inevitable; if the page is getting close to the "too long" warning, it should just be split.

Amonimus (Sergeant)
2022-12-28 12:10:30

I have two issues with this.

1. It's "fixing what isn't broken". And how much it reduces, 10 bytes per link? Even in total that's negligable economy.

2. Weblinks Are Not Examples, so youtube links aren't needed in the first place. We actually risk endorsing music pirates channels.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
bwburke94 (Y2: Electric Boogaloo)
2022-12-28 13:25:34

I'd go the opposite route and avoid youtu.be links altogether, because they play havoc with browser history.

Whether Awesome Music needs a cleanup is best served for another discussion.

2025: the year it all ends?
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
2022-12-28 14:03:35

The youtu.be links are, iirc, what you get when you hit the Share button on a given video, so I've always taken it as what the site prefers. That said, I don't go out of my way to use it unless I'm editing a link anyway (such as adding a timestamp or something)

mlsmithca (Edited uphill both ways)
2022-12-28 14:37:55

If I'm reading the "similar thread" correctly, it's dedicated more to dead video links, which are a sitewide issue (that's why there's a Weblinks Are Not Examples rule, of course), particularly in SugarWiki/ namespaces where many examples consist of video links with minimal descriptions at best, making replacements impossible to find.

But regarding bwburke94's point about the youtu.be links causing browser history issues and Amonimus' point about the negligible space saving even on large pages (to re-iterate my own point, on the largest pages, that's not going to stop them from needing to be split eventually), should the changes be reverted? (As daunting as the number of pages is, the reversion would probably just involve the reverse of the Find/Replace they did to shorten them. It would take about the same amount of time to undo as it took to do.)

And at the very least, a change this large scale - entailing "large edits" to literally hundreds of pages - seems like it shouldn't be done unilaterally.

mlsmithca (Edited uphill both ways)
2023-01-19 15:13:59

Bumping because they've gone on another tear through various SugarWiki/ pages shortening YouTube links. I sent them a "unilateral" notifier echoing the concerns in this ATT thread.

In the meantime, should the changes be reverted since they result in negligible space savings (some of the pages they've done this on only have three or four video links) and cause browser history problems?

amathieu13 Since: Aug, 2013
2023-01-19 19:24:26

The shortened links aren't wrong or harmful in of themselves, so I personally don't think reverting the changes is needed. Though, I do think it would be good to get them to stop and do a bigger discussion on changing all of these things unilaterally.

I also agree about the need for a larger convo about Awesome Music pages linking to youtube (and other video hosting sites) in general.

mlsmithca (Edited uphill both ways)
2023-01-19 21:29:55

Well, from what bwburke94 said after the previous wave of URL abbreviations, while they may not be harmful, they're not beneficial either, as they cause issues with browser history that the longer links don't cause; to echo Amonimus, it's fixing something that isn't broken.

RainehDaze (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
2023-01-20 06:39:41

What issues do they cause with browser history? The only thing I can possibly think of is the fact it redirects from the shortened version to the full URL, but at most that might prevent going back from working (you'd be redirected instantly), except I just checked that on my end and it's fine (on both Firefox and Chrome). The history might list the same page twice on Chrome, but I don't think that qualifies as a problem.

It's obviously not doing much, but I'm not sure where this notion of there being history issues is coming from.

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