h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

MaW, re: Post 3, pre-parsing the links at the point you submitted them wouldn't add too much of a load. It would only have to be done once, rather than every time a link appeared on-site... Only the condensed "Fxxxxx/Axxxxx" part of the address would actually end up in the database - much cleaner!

when will this very, very, anoying skin refence by removed!

When the Internet is so big that they have to invent a new URL format?

already done (sort of)

http://www.xns.org/
it works with
=personal
@businessname

no more dotdom or dotorg and trademark protected

simple version
http://xns.org/=pheloxi

This has obviously been fixed since. I thought I'd point that out in case any later readers (newbies) are confused.

It looks nicer to just post the last part of the URL, but if you do post the lot, including the skin element, it makes no difference. The parser recognises that it's an internal link and makes it behave like one, no matter what it says.

Skin changes can be forced, but only by adding a skin=skinname field to the end.

?attribute=value&otherattribute=othervalue&soon=soforth

Therefore:

A753527?skin=plain
F55607?thread=192835&skip=50&show=10&skin=plain

TRiG.