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Ask HN: Unknown or expired link.

2 points by owkaye ↗ HN
I cannot tell you how many times on this forum I've been browsing the threads only to suddenly get this error page/message:

"Unknown or expired link."

It would seem to "make sense" (from my way of thinking, especially on a tech-savvy forum like this) to automatically redirect the visitor to the new posts rather than showing them this error ... or at least put a link on the error page that gives visitors the proper URL to click after the error message:

Unknown or expired link. <a href=http://news.ycombinator.com>Click here for the newest threads/posts</a>.

3 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 16.5 ms ] thread
pbhjpbhj
I only get that when submitting comments to threads after a period of time has passed between starting the comment and submitting. The answer for me is simply to reload the page.

Thus it would seem that instead of a simple link to the news home it should bump me back to a reload of the previous page?

owkaye
I seldom post, but I browse threads slowly, and I get the error page whenever I've waited too long to click the "more" link at the bottom of the page.

It seems that each time I click the "new" link it resets a cookie (or posts a hidden form field, I haven't checked which) that identifies the time of that click. Then when this time expires I get the error upon my next click of the "more" link.

I cannot just reload the page in this situation because the page being displayed is the error page, so I have to manually strip off the characters that appear in the URL after "http://news.ycombinator.com/ ... and when I do this I get the same new page as if I had clicked the "new" link. This is why I suggested providing a clickable "new" link on the error page.

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