690536 - Improvement: Unique, short URL that people can use in signatures etc.

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, defect, P1)

Description

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

Right now, my profile URL is:

https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/495bae85e8

Would be great if we could have it be shorter, something like:

mozillians.org/limi

…either use the IRC nickname as the base (which is already a pretty unique namespace since we have our own IRC servers), or let people pick a shortname.

If you have to show the /en-US/ parts and other things, we should have a "the shortened link to this profile is…" footer on the profile.

This stuff is what Google gets wrong all the time; people want to put these URLs in email signatures, on business cards, etc — so they have to be short and memorable, and look good.

Comment 2

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Looked into this a bit with nigelb. To hook into NickServ, we could create a new Mozillians bot that could relay registered nick confirmation to Mozillians.org from NickServ (this is obviously a work-around).

Of course, there should be a way to call into NickServ, but I'm not sure who to talk to about that. Cc'in mrz and reed for some guidance.

Comment 3

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

It would have been great if I actually cc'ed mrz and reed...

Comment 4

[matthew zeier [:mrz]]

Between Reed & justdave,  you'll have the right folks to help here.

Comment 5

[Jeff Hammel]

Is it 'shorter' that is important or 'more readable'? I care more about the latter

Comment 6

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Yeah, either a bot that talks directly to NickServ or one that just checks if an online user is registered (umode +r). NickServ uses a local .db on the server for now, but I guess it could be swapped to use mysql, which could be accessed directly from the mozillians app. Lots of ways to do this, some quicker than others.

Happy to discuss this on IRC if you want to grab me and dave for a discussion.

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Unique NickServ-based IRC handles seems like the best way to go here. But an easier-to-code second best might be to just make the IRC handle field unique within Mozillians. If someone else grabs your handle on Mozillians while you have it on NickServ, we can sort it out manually between you. I suspect that'll be a fairly rare case.

Gerv

Comment 8

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

Yeah, making the IRC nick the unique name makes sense to me, since people pick that one themselves.

Writing something that connects to IRC to verify this seems error-prone and overkill — in the rare cases where we have conflicts, we can resolve them manually.

Comment 9

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

(In reply to Jeff Hammel [:jhammel] from comment #5)
> Is it 'shorter' that is important or 'more readable'? I care more about the
> latter

Yeah, I meant "more readable", not mozillians.org/vN34 as in URL shorteners. I'd like mine to be mozillians.org/limi, and then reserve a URL space for internal pages to avoid collision.

Comment 10

[Andrew Findlay]

"More readable" is good for some people, and bad for others. One of the guiding principles of Gerv's original design is that users should have complete and detailed control over the privacy of their data. If we use the IRC Nick in the URL then we are effectively saying that people *have to register an IRC Nick* and also that *the IRC Nick cannot be hidden*.

The full privacy control has not been implemented in the production service yet so this interaction may not be obvious, but it will come...
You should also be aware that the IRC Nick is just the first of many links to other services that the Phonebook is capable of supporting.

Comment 11

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

(In reply to Andrew Findlay from comment #10)
> If we use the
> IRC Nick in the URL then we are effectively saying that people *have to
> register an IRC Nick* and also that *the IRC Nick cannot be hidden*.

Heck, at the moment the email address is mandatory and public — and if I believe bug 690742, that’s a feature. I’d much rather have my IRC nick public than my email address.

Comment 12

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Jeff, Alex and Fabien: it's more about making them readable and identifiable. I'm assuming that a IRC nickname would be the easiest way to do that (and possibly changing that field to "Nickname" and hint toward IRC nicks).

Reed & justdave: Would love an answer if we can do this with the Phonebook and get it into a release cycle!

Comment 13

[Jeff Hammel]

Yep, irc nick works for me :)

Comment 14

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Tofumatt and I chatted about this. Here are the thoughts and possible things to do:

* Change IRC nickname to nickname (though we should suggest IRC nickname for that field)
* Make the nickname field unique
* Set nickname as the unique identifier for a Mozillians' profile


Since we're possibly pivoting nickname as the identifier for a profile, it may require a lot of code changes. If not, mabe it's a good contributor owned feature?

Comment 15

[Brian King [:kinger]]

Regardless of what nick is used, can we use the mzl.la short url service? e.g. http://mzl.la/mary-c

Comment 16

[Andrew Findlay]

(In reply to Aakash Desai [:aakashd] from comment #14)

> * Change IRC nickname to nickname (though we should suggest IRC nickname for that field)
> * Make the nickname field unique
> * Set nickname as the unique identifier for a Mozillians' profile

The nickname used for this purpose would certainly have to be in the main entry, not in a pointer sub-entry as the IRC Nick is at present. This is because the nickname has to be unique and we can only enforce that sensibly on a defined attribute in the main entry.

Changing the uniqueIdentifier value to match the nickname has some merits, and may allow most of the display code to work unchanged. The big downside though is that this means the entry name (DN) will change when the user chooses a nickname: this will either break group membership or require an LDAP overlay to maintain referential integrity. It will also need changes to the LDAP ACLs. Another downside is that the entry name is discoverable by anon users, so if the nickname is part of it then we cannot offer much privacy for that attribute.

> Since we're possibly pivoting nickname as the identifier for a profile, it
> may require a lot of code changes.

How about having the 'Mozillians nickname' (which might happen to be the same as the 'Mozilla IRC Nickname') as an attribute of the main entry, but not change the uniqueIdentifier or entry DN? The display code could offer a short URL route using the new nickname as an alternative to the existing uniqueIdentifier-based URL. That would allow users to hide the nickname if they choose at a later date, only breaking the optional URL. Taking an earlier example:

https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/495bae85e8

or

https://mozillians.org/n/limi

(I am hoping that the en-US bit can get lost entirely...)

Comment 17

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

(In reply to Andrew Findlay from comment #16)
> https://mozillians.org/n/limi

If people are going to remember it,, use it in print, etc — we should drop the /n part too. Either reserve the common URL fragments used by the application, or put the entire namespace in a separate directory, e.g. /app/*?

Comment 18

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

We should tackle this with other clean-y sort of issues in 1.3.

Comment 19

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Bram: in this bug, we want to allow profiles to be linked via their nicknames used. This requires nicknames to be unique and required.

Comment 20

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Mockup for this can be found here - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728877#c4

Comment 21

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

This landed on dev and is on stage now thanks to tallOwen.

Comment 22

[Matt Brandt [:mbrandt]]

Per :tallowen's email to the the list - 
This change will allow people to change their username. They will also be able to access their profile at mozillians.org/<username> (i.e. mozillians.org/tallowen). 

This requires us make sure users aren't choosing bad usernames like 'groups', 'search' or 'tofumatt' because it could interfere with the app. (The entire list of blacklisted usernames are here: https://github.com/mozilla/mozillians/blob/master/settings/default.py#L193). 

We also make sure on username validation that usernames to not match any url in the app (https://github.com/mozilla/mozillians/blob/prod/apps/phonebook/forms.py#L53).

Comment 23

[Matt Brandt [:mbrandt]]

QA verified on dev -

Once a nickname has been set by the user, the url updates from something along the pattern of 
/u/X0brpvvJgt4aPf1vlGvd1KODX-o to mozillians-dev.allizom.org/<local>/<username> 

Only unique usernames are allowed, non-alphanumeric characters are disallowed presenting the user with an error if they waver from this path.

I've filed bug 736556 and bug 736562 to capture implementation specific concerns I have. Please reopen and set the bugs as blockers if you feel they should prevent this feature from moving to stage.