Yeh I'm sanitizing already thankfully. I've fixed the decoding issue, but I'm expecting some % of users to be borked for a whole other variety of quirky reasons.
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Nice :)
Ah, I bet you discovered that subdomains aren't case-sensitive while HN usernames are case-sensitive, didn't you? :)
HN usernames aren't case-sensitive:
> That username conflicts with an existing one. Names are case-insensitive. Please choose another.
They're case-sensitive for the purpose of scraping a profile page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Retr0id - 200
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=retr0id - 404 (Edit: 200 now?)
That second one doesn't give me a 404 but correctly shows your profile.
Weird, it also works for me now, I could've sworn it didn't work before.
The firebase API on the other hand remains case-sensitive:
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/Retr0id.json => full response
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/retr0id.json => null
I think maybe you're thinking about the "threads" list/page:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Retr0id - Works
- https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=retr0id - Doesn't work
Which somehow I guess the API is using.
Possibly, although according to this[0] the main profile URL used to be case-sensitive too. It must've changed recently, but I have no idea when.