Reply To: The Random Post Thread (Game Potential)
Also not to be confused with Mamet.
(“Everybody needs Monet. That’s why they call it ‘Monet’.“)
@Percephene: As we’ve been saying, there are two kinds of links, and looking at them will tell you how they were obtained. The ones that look like
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=497&Focus=22903#Comment_22903
are obtained via search; the ones that look like
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=117&page=1#Item_1
are obtained via the process Ben and I (and others) have outlined above.
I really didn’t want to have to get into these details, but you’ve forced my hand. 😉 Ben is right when he says that there are “easy obvious patterns in all the naming and identifying” — I haven’t opened up the database or anything (“user administrator” = “more access than you, but not that much more”), but it seems pretty clear that comments are being stored in at least two different ways, by comment number (“Comment_22903” in my first example above) or by location on the page (“Item_1” in my second example). If one of the comments above it or on a previous page were to be deleted, all the comments would have to be repaginated, changing its “Item” number, but its “Comment” number stays the same. It appears that “Focus=22903” tells Vanilla to display the page in the given discussion that contains comment 22903. If you knew the comment number of any particular comment, it’s perfectly plausible that you could hand-code the “focus/comment” URL, but it’s a bit more of a hoop to jump through, IMO.