Mastodon: Link verification fails with trailing slash in Mastodon profile link.

[davmillar]

Expected behaviour

I expected link verification to automatically work out of the box.

Actual behaviour

Link verification did not work out of the box.

Steps to reproduce the problem

I've had my Mastodon profile linked from my portfolio site with rel="me" for a while, but it did not appear verified when my instance was upgraded. I found that the trailing slash on the profile link on my website caused a failure to match. e.g. It wanted https://puz.fun/@dave but I had https://puz.fun/@dave/

I'd also like to suggest adding verbiage to the profile editor stating that you must re-save your profile metadata to recheck verification. As a developer I can see why that step is necessary, but the average user might not think to try that.

Specifications

Mastodon 2.6.1

[Gargron]

I am not sure I can classify this as a bug since sometimes the trailing slash actually serves a different page. So it makes sense to use an exact match.

[davmillar]

When you say 'sometimes' do you mean in general as it regards links on the internet or specifically on Mastodon? When I try my profile from either link, both resolve with the same content but there's no 301 redirect in the event of a trailing slash being present or anything. I can see not wanting to apply this generally to all sites, but I'm not sure if there's a Mastodon-specific case where this would not apply.

[nightpool]

let's fix this by redirecting mastodon urls to canonicalized versions

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018, 6:31 PM David Millar [e-mail] wrote:

When you say 'sometimes' do you mean in general as it regards links on the
internet or specifically on Mastodon? When I try my profile from either
link, both resolve with the same content but there's no 301 redirect in the
event of a trailing slash being present or anything. I can see not wanting
to apply this generally to all sites, but I'm not sure if there's a
Mastodon-specific case where this would not apply.

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[davmillar]

@nightpool I suppose that fixes it from the perspective of users not necessarily seeing the non-canonical URL, but the fact that the erroneous URL still works and makes sense from the perspective of discoverable URL structure, it feels like the validation routine should allow for a trailing slash.

[nightpool]

my understanding is that if we do a redirect, the validation routine will
follow it, but I may be mistaken

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018, 9:12 PM David Millar [e-mail] wrote:

@nightpool https://github.com/nightpool I suppose that fixes it from
the perspective of users not necessarily seeing the non-canonical URL, but
the fact that the erroneous URL still works and makes sense from the
perspective of discoverable URL structure, it feels like the validation
routine should allow for a trailing slash.

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[kevinmarks]

the atom feed links to https://mastodon.social/users/kevinmarks which 301s to "https://mastodon.social/@kevinmarks" (no slash)
and
https://mastodon.social/users/kevinmarks.atom so https://mastodon.social/@kevinmarks/ (with trailing slash) should 301 the same way.
This should help with searchability too, as there is no rel="canonical" currently.

[nightpool]

@kevinmarks we should also add the rel=canonical too but my gut feeling is that the difference is minute for most user pages