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iftechfoundation / ifdb-suggestion-tracker

Bugs and feature requests for a future IFDB update
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Put the game title in viewgame URLs #181

Open dfabulich opened 3 years ago

dfabulich commented 3 years ago

What game is this? https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

You can't tell just by looking, and neither can I. It would be better if the URL contained the name of the game. Perhaps something like this:

https://ifdb.org/game/Counterfeit-Monkey?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

Google displays keywords like this directly in search results, with little arrows, like this:

ifdb.org › game › Counterfeit Monkey

It's a widely shared piece of SEO wisdom that users are more likely to click on search results whose URLs contain the keywords they searched for. (This wisdom is also reflected in my personal experience working on the web.)

As a result, an URL like https://ifdb.org/game/Counterfeit-Monkey?id=aearuuxv83plclpl is more likely to be clicked on than https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl; since Google knows that, Google sometimes even ranks keyword-laden URLs more highly than URLs that don't contain keywords. As a result, embedding keywords in URLs has an outsized effect on site traffic.

curiousdannii commented 3 years ago

How about https://ifdb.org/game/aearuuxv83plclpl/Counterfeit-Monkey

qdacsvx commented 3 years ago

This could affect privacy if people can tell what games I play just from snooping the web links.

dfabulich commented 3 years ago

Could you elaborate on that? How would other people get to see what web links you visit? (Surely if they can see that, your privacy has been thoroughly violated…?)

qdacsvx commented 3 years ago

Suppose I haven't come out to my family, but they monitor my internet usage.

dfabulich commented 3 years ago

Assuming that your family (or workplace) "controls" the computer, standard internet monitors show the title and contents of pages, not just URLs. AFAIK, there's not an actual piece of internet monitoring software in widespread use that will catch the URLs but not the page titles, so there's no actual reason to keep our titles out of our URLs, IMO.

qdacsvx commented 3 years ago

While I'm playing a work, the URL can be read over my shoulder. If the URL contains a title, it can easily be reproduced in a web search, identifying the work.

To mitigate the risk of privacy violation, ifdb could support both styles of web link. There could be a user option to choose between pseudonymous code links or links that contain titles.

Code links are a fixed size - shorter than links with the code and an added title.

A link which is composed of words (i.e. without any alphanumeric codes) is more accessible, easier to remember, speakable and (more) screen-readable, easier to reproduce if you heard it, (relatively) easy to use on a mobile phone. More sharable.

https://ifdb.org/if/Counterfeit-Monkey