Unknown or expired link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2992474

by Andi • 15 years ago

28 14 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Could you solve the "Unknown or expired link." problem on hackernews?

primo44• 15 years ago

Since news entries are constantly being juggled/reordered, I think it was a choice that they made. Whenever I get that error I just start on page 1 again.

Hisoka• 15 years ago

I don't get that. Reddit nor Digg has this problem..

veb• 15 years ago

it really is annoying though.

redidas• 15 years ago

I absolutely can not stand running into that message. By the time I'm finished browsing the posts and comments on the first page and click the next page link, I run into that error.

Then I click the back button, thinking that will do the trick, and click the next page link. Same error, because I never actually got a refreshed page when I went back.

So then I have to click back again, click refresh, then click the next page, all to go to the next page.

I understand that it may have been intentional, but it really hurts usability.

I sort of find it contradictory that hacker news itself feels a bit clunky, but maybe that's the point. Launch when you have something and eventually you'll know what is needed and what is just an annoyance.

dsl2• 15 years ago

I wonder if you could apply to ycombinator to build a better hackernews...

davesmylie• 15 years ago

Yup. Super painful.

I put it down to a (perhaps unintentional) * anti-procrastination device on HN's part.

Eg I'll load up a page worth of links and go read them. If by the time I finished reading and go back to HN to click on 'Next Page' and I get 'Unknown or expired link', this means that I've probably spent far too long reading already and should probably go and do some actual productive work.

* This doesn't always work as intended = /

silverbax882• 15 years ago

Looks like a choice to keep scrapers from being able to deep dive into the list of submissions, etc.

dsl2• 15 years ago

It's just a broken implementation of pagination.

A scraper would move on to the next page almost immediately, real humans take a while to get to the next page.

silverbax882• 15 years ago

Yeah, I considered that (and you are right), but if this is an attempt at pagination, it's a 'WTF' head scratcher as to why you'd make it so complicated. I'm not saying I know, just giving the coders the benefit of the doubt.

dchuk• 15 years ago

Go back. Refresh the page. Click More.

I think the more important thing to worry about here is getting back to work, not the pages on a social news aggregator expiring for being open too long.

pygorex• 15 years ago

This wouldn't be a problem if I could choose the number of articles per page - 30 articles per page isn't enough. I rarely go more than 5 pages deep on HN. If HN was just a single page with 300 entries that I could refresh (or would auto-refresh via Comet/AJAX) I would be a happy camper.

instakill• 15 years ago

It sucks when you have 20 pages to catch up on and you're forced to open all interesting looking links in new tabs, get to the end before your time runs out, and only then start reading the new tabs.

funkah• 15 years ago

Or, at the very, very, very least, could that terrible error page contain a link to the front page?

Unknown or expired link.

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