Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

Hi, it has been my understanding that one of the many purposes of Flow is to address breaking links to comments in discussions (as discussions get archived, etc.) On that basis, I left a link to this talk page, in an answer on Quora, in 2013: https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-find-confusing-about-Wikipedias-discussion-systems/answer/Pete-Forsyth

However, the link there no longer works: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Flow#Response_to_Quora_question_24055

What happened to my comment here? Why is the link now broken?

For real permalinks, use the "Permalink" option in the topic (or post) menu.

OK...thanks for the answer, and good to know. IMO this is another significant shortcoming of Flow.

Update, I found my post -- but it was apparently moved (perhaps copy-pasted and then deleted? When? By whom? Quiddity perhaps?) This is a problem, because in a pre-Flow world I would have simply used a permalink to an old revision. So in this way, it seems that Flow is providing less functionality than the preceding system. Flow/Research/Experienced_user_responses#Pete_Forsyth

Hi Pete. You had made your post at this page location, but that was when the page was using LiquidThreads. In December 2013, that LQT board was page-moved to /Archive_2 so that the page could start to use Flow. Then in June 2015, the LQT page (/Archive_2) was converted to Flow along with the other LQT pages on this wiki. So, your topic is now at Topic:R2nb2zhwpjlovnge, and if it were not for the page-move, then the LQT permalink (if that's what you had in your Quora post) would've been successfully redirected to the Flow permalink. HTH.

I think it may have worked if Pete had linked to the LQT Thread namespace page as well (we have handling for redirecting those to Flow Topic). I'm not positive, though, due to the complexities in this case.

Aha, that makes a lot of sense -- thank you Quiddity (WMF)!

Ugly vs. good looking permalinks: This link is ugly: Topic:Rxozcohzzgcnydpf - and this is good looking: Thread:Extension talk:VisualEditor/VisualEditor freezes at loading bar. - Since by default we get "ugly" permalinks, my question is: can we also get the "good looking" permalinks for topics somehow? Thanks

@Ark25, not currently, but there is regular discussion amongst the team about resolving this. The task to watch for updates, is Phab:T59154.