Further suggestions for automatic cleanups of newly added external links

Although there’s already plenty of websites whose links upon addition to MB entities get cleanup up to a bare-bones canonical form (Discogs or Apple Music being some that I most often encounter - https://www.discogs.com/artist/69866-ABBA > https://www.discogs.com/artist/69866 - titles or names are removed, leaving you only with the entity type and ID#), some recent edits of mine made me realize that this automatic URL cleanup can be further extended to external links to many other websites too.
All are URLs that already contain the permanent numerical or string IDs of entities (artists, labels, releases, etc.) on said websites. Even if you remove all superfluous elements or replace them with one or more placeholder characters, the resulting link can still get you to the desired page.

setlist.fm

The [name] on:

https://www.setlist.fm/setlists/[name]-[alphanumeric-id].html

can be replaced with wd.

https://www.setlist.fm/setlists/wd-[alphanumeric-id].html

Example: Edit #115617969 where I changed tori-amos-13d6b9e9.html to wd-13d6b9e9.html

Qobuz

I noticed that there’s - and _ that work as replacements for names on artist (or interpreter as called on URLs) and album links respectively. You can see my edits #115442141 and #115633898 as examples for each respectively.

Beatport

Similar to aforementioned Qobuz, names and titles can be replaced with a single character, namely - and _. Unlike Qobuz however, both characters can be interchangeably used on links to artist pages as well as releases.

For example, on Edit #115535563 I shortened the link to Beatport release by replacing the title with hyphen-minus, although underscore works too:

Same case with artist pages on my Edit #115443033.
If you change the underscore with hyphen-minus the link still works:

Cast Albums

Links to artist pages can be simplified by replacing the artist name with underscore, see Edit #115617968.

There might be more websites whose links can use a similar clean-up (that I may have forgotten of), these were just at the top of my editing history.

4 Likes

Interesting discoveries!

It’s pretty obnoxious that Beatport doesn’t redirect to whichever form of the URL they consider the canonical one. All of the following give me the same page without a redirect:

https://www.beatport.com/release/3825694 is a 404, though. :-/

Having just done a lot of cleanup of Beatport URLs for https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBBE-87, my general impression is that they don’t care about keeping their URLs working.

1 Like

To be honest, while removing an unneeded section of a URL makes sense to me, there’s a point when it starts feeling too much to replace chunks with symbols and whatnot. So personally I’d not do these sorts of changes, unless the site actively promotes those styles as permalinks.

8 Likes

Why replace?

Why wd? What did it mean (why not a, like artist)?

Yes, I aussi think the artist name the redirect to, is still nicer.