is shortening URLs this much a good default?

[foss-]

#14080 changed the way URLs are handled and introduced URL shortening.

Personally I am not in favor of that recent change. Let me explain why:

If you look at the following post, which has three URLs linking to a bug tracker, none of the URLs provides any useful information. Since the most important part - the bug number which is at the end of the URL - becomes shortened, the entire post becomes much harder to use / process / make sense of.

https://pirati.ca/display/ec054ce7-1666-1f98-17ba-548834429014

The URL shortening is especially annoying here, as there really is no gain. E.g. the first URL is https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127610 which may even fit in a single row and would not have increased the length of the post size wise (character wise it obviously would have).

I understand it is a good idea to shorting URLs that are a few hundred characters long. But maybe the limit when shortening begins should be raised?

[AlfredSK]

Just a hint. You can hover your mouse to reveal the complete URL. On mobile it seems to work with a long press.

[tobiasd]

After testing the shortened URLs now for two weeks, could we just reverse #14090 (maybe only the shortening part of the PR) or at least make it configurable by the user and off by default? Yes mouse over works, but this is a rather clumsy UX to get the information from the URL that is currently cut off from most of the links (the actual page name).

[MrPetovan]

What is the page name for you?

[tobiasd]

The name of the actual file the link goes to, not only the domain name. Sometimes also the path is important (e.g. when it shows the department of a news).

[annando]

Sadly it can't be configurable for the user, since the parsing is done outside the user context.

[MrPetovan]

The name of the actual file the link goes to, not only the domain name. Sometimes also the path is important (e.g. when it shows the department of a news).

Indeed, but the problem is that it isn't consistent across websites, so we'd be chasing ghost trying to keep "meaningfuly" shortened URLs while there's no standard to publish URLs.

For example, with the URL https://pirati.ca/display/ec054ce7-1666-1f98-17ba-548834429014, according to you, we wouldn't be able to shorten it much because ec054ce7-1666-1f98-17ba-548834429014 would be the page name and /display/ would be the path.