Ask PG: Can you display plus.google.com domains?

[nicholasreed]

Previous title: Ask PG: Can you display some subdomains on urls?

For example: plus.google.com. It is a very different product from google.com and I have the understanding that discerning where you are headed is the point of displaying any urls.

Edited: I stupidly forgot to clarify that this would be most appreciated on mobile. With 3G speeds and most mobile browsers not offering any sort of plugin or user script ability to auto-show the entire url or subdomain, it is a minor inconvenience.

Edit 2: tokenadult pointed out this is already done (wordpress, posterous, etc). So, pg, can google.com be added to the list?

[tokenadult]

Reading the news.arc source code

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

will show what the trade-offs are for how Hacker News is currently designed. Meanwhile, the Show Full Domain on Hacker News posts user script

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121512

works fine on Chrome (and I think on Firefox too) for showing all the full domain names that might otherwise be confusing here. I read that some users are reading HN mostly on mobile devices that don't allow mousing over the submission titles for the full URL, but that is also an option for any user who is reading HN at a desktop computer.

[resnamen]

If the Chrome plugin works fine, can't HN just expose a toggle in the user preferences for injecting that same Javascript code? A bit of a hack, yes, but it'd probably do for the time being.

[nicholasreed]

Pull Request time! Line 1577 defines the long domain urls.

[jemfinch]

I'm not entirely sure why HN doesn't just display the full hostname. Displaying only the domain and TLD is actually harder than just displaying the full hostname, and I don't think there's a major risk of spammers using the hostname as some covert advertising mechanism.

[derefr]

> Displaying only the domain and TLD is actually harder than just displaying the full hostname

Perhaps it just reuses the result of some work it's already doing in order to cluster karma/number-of-replies/something else on a per-domain basis, for some sort of convenient analytics. Just a charitable guess.

[robryan]

Yeah, I haven't looked at the source but there isn't an algorithmic way to remove subdomains without a huge lookup list to cover all the edge cases.

[jrockway]

It would be even better if it displayed as much information as HN knows about the site. Instead of "plus.google.com", "Jonathan Rockway's Google+" would be even more useful. It would also be good if it could correlate these sites with usernames on HN. (Making it "jrockway's Google+" in that case.)

[firefoxman1]

Ooh! I like that a lot, but then HN would have to rework their code to be parse Google+, but no other site, for the person's name. If only Google+ would enable vanity URLs already...

[coderdude]

This is too funny. I wrote out a comment on the G+ article on the homepage that basically said something along the lines of "now don't go complaining about subdomains," but I didn't post it because I felt it wouldn't be necessary this time. Sure enough, you've proven me wrong.

Just mouse over the link. If you're on your mobile, hold your finger on the link until the modal pops up with more details. Hacker News...

Edit: I am pro-full-domain. I think it would be an excellent change, however...

It's such a trivial change in the code that I can't imagine pg hasn't thought this one through. With as many times as people have complained about it he has definitely heard this side of the argument already and it's not changed his mind so far. So why are we revisiting this? Is there a canonical 'this is why' for this feature that we can just point to and be done with it?

[sp332]

If HN shows the domain, it should at least be useful. Why do the work when I can have toe computer do it for me? HACKER News :)

[danking00]

If you could choose freely for no cost between, perhaps, the first subdomain appearing versus not, would you really opt for not?

Mousing over the link seems like unnecessary work when subdomains could be added without sacrificing the readability of HN at all.

Whether it's worth the time investment, I'm not sure. I can't imagine it would be too hard to grab the first subdomain from the link, but perhaps I'm ignoring some significant edge case.

[nicholasreed]

Edited: I stupidly forgot to clarify that this would be most appreciated on mobile. With 3G speeds and most mobile browsers not offering any sort of plugin or user script ability to auto-show the entire url or subdomain, it is a minor inconvenience.

[newhouseb]

It appears there is already support for this on a case by case basis. See, for example this post linking to wordpress: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3494340

[Natsu]

As others have said, I think it would be nice if it always included the subdomain except when the subdomain is 'www'. Are there really any places where that would be undesireable?

True, fixing just plus.google.com would take care of about 99% of current complaints, but if we're going to take up PG's valuable time, we might as well ask for the more thorough fix.

[lancewiggs]

I for one am quite happy with Google+ posts coming through as Google. It's fairly easy to understand that they are G+ and not Google Corp, and we can treat them accordingly.

The issue is (personally) that I see the source as similar to a Facebook post. It's from someone who does not have a personal domain or other publishing outlet, and the source does not identify the writer.

While I struggle to understand why you'd want to write prose on G+ or Facebook, HN is brilliant for unearthing the few articles worthy of community attention.

[kalistoga]

Wow I was going to write exactly the same thing earlier today. So funny how people think the same thing at the same moment. I agree it's really annoying. I still can't familiarize myself with links with google.com domain. Nowadays it's mostly some guy's google+ post but it's really misleading. First thing that comes up to mind when you see a link from google.com is "is this an announcement from Google, inc.?", when it's mostly some dude's rant on Google+