User blog:H Fern/URLs and the such.

Thought i hate to admin it, I sometimes think the "subdomain.wikia.com/wiki/This_Page" urls look a bit tacky. I would love it if I could give a link to someone that looks more like "wikia.com/subdomain" and less like "freehosting.wikia.com". It might be a vanity thing, but I would love that even more.

What I propose is that when someone looks up "wikia.com/*" wikia.com first performs an internal search of wikia's own top level wiki. If it finds a match, it will display its own wiki page (akin to wikia.com/index.php?title=*).

However, if it doesn't find it's own page, it will search for a wiki with the subdomain "*". If it finds a wiki with a matching subdomain it will throw a redirect to that wiki's main page (e.g. wikia.com/example ->  example.wikia.com/wiki/Example_Wiki).

If there is no matching subdomains, it would throw the current "Search all wikis" page (including wikia.com's). (e.g. wikia.com/* ->  wikia.com/Special:Search?search=* ).

There is a significantly less possibility that you could also incorporate specific pages into the short url. It would require some sort of delimeter between domain name and page name though. Perhaps wikia.com/*./+ (where "+" is the page name and "./" is the delimeter). So wikia.com/fringe./Walter_Bishop leads to Fringe Wiki > Walter Bishop.

But at its very least, http://wikia.com/fringe directing to http://fringe.wikia.com/wiki/FringeWiki is that much better than the long form.

Maybe even throw in language codes somewhere in there as well. Who knows?

Anyways, comments & suggestions, please. --H Fern [ talk ] 04:04, May 26, 2011 (UTC)