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Ask HN: Is there a good list of usernames to block such as 'about' and 'legal'

12 points by scosman ↗ HN
I'm planning on launching an site with vanity urls (url.com/username), and I don't want someone grabbing something like url.com/legal for their user profile.

I've googled and found 1 or 2 lists for usernames block impersonation in posts (like 'admin' and 'moderator'), but the vanity URL introduces even more concerns.

10 comments

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mrgoldenbrown
Finding a complete list is going to be tough. Why not some indicator that is out of band? Something like all vanity URLs are at url.com/users/username. That way there will always be a way to establish official URLs from vanity.
nik_0_0
Yeah, but the indicator makes the URL a little unseemly. In Facebook's example, some companies have stopped putting their URL in commercials altogether, instead relying on "www.facebook.com/doritos" (arbitrary example), simple and clean. "www.facebook.com/corporatepage/doritos" would not have the same cleanliness nor usefulness. This is probably a huge point in Facebook's favour.
fshaun
A prefixed tilde is often associated with user content and keeps the URL short: "example.com/~doritos".
cucho
what about the opposite? example.com/johndoe, example.com/~about, example.com/~legal
Dexec
http://www.quora.com/How-do-sites-prevent-vanity-URLs-from-c...
scosman
Great link. The top answer from GitHub nailed it. None of the proposed lists included 'legal' which I would consider the top priority. You can't guess every possible problem, so don't try.

Also, after wire framing, I also found I needed the title "Profile" above the username anyways. T-minus 10 minutes to a user named "free iPad 2!" :)

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hahainternet
You'll also need to be careful about homographic characters. I've implemented a small solution internally for this but I'll try and clean it up and get it put somewhere public.