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Comment by pork | Hacker News Reader

OT, but that is one hell of a hierarchical URL

They use DotNetNuke, a god awful CMS running on ASP.NET WebForms. Together with Umbraco, it's the most popular open source CMS in the Microsoft world. It's really sad.

You can access the page (internally called a "tab") by its "TabId", for instance: http://www.theiacp.org/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1665

or, just by using query string parameters: http://www.theiacp.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1007&id=1665

DotNetNuke uses a system similar to Joomla (at least I think so) where a page is composed of instances of modules that are placed inside "panes", these panes in turn are defined by the theme a given page uses.

Alas, I guess they have a custom news module where an article can be accessed by supplying an id parameter in its query string.

http://www.theiacp.org/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1660 will point to a different news article. It's technically still the same page however.

Oh god, I hate DNN. I had to use it for my fraternity's site when I was redoing it because one of the alumni is the director of training for it. The sad part is he would never respond or help. That thing was such a pain to use. Trying to actually get into the nuts and bolts (css, html, js, ect.) of any of the pages was horrible.

I'm sorry you had a difficult time reaching me and working with DotNetNuke. Anyone else having trouble trying to learn/use DNN, feel free to email me at chris.hammond@dnncorp.com or call me at 650-288-3153

There are a number of ways to utilize URLs in DotNetNuke, the IACP website is definitely not what I would consider a best practice for their use.

It appears that most of the directories that appear between the domain name and the final file name are optional. The following URL points to the same page:

http://www.theiacp.org/This/Is/Something/That/Does/Not/Exist...

The /By is also unnecessary. This certainly makes it easier to submit a story to HN multiple times.

It's not too difficult to trick a filter on any page. I assume you can append a garbage query string for the same effect.

Hmm, I guess the difference here is that the few people who will pick up on garbage query strings would likely miss an altered path, if it was made carefully.

Wish I could upvote and draw a giant red arrow bringing attention to your comment. That URL is incredible. Would've posted this comment earlier but I've just got back from reading out the URL to the rest of the office.

http://www.theiacp.org/tabid/1007/Default.aspx?id=1665 appears to point to the same page, so the long URL might just be SEO.

Well, one the one hand you get a lot of words in the URL nobody will ever search for, especially not concatenated as they are -- on the other hand that page looks to be 9 levels deep from the domain root. I doubt there is an actually good reason, it's just a crappy CMS.

Rather this is a result of this particular USAGE of the CMS, not the CMS itself.

And yet the page's URL still had a ?id=1665 story id. id=1666 is a different Alzheimer's success story from the IACP State Associations of Chiefs of Police's Missing Alzheimer's Disease Patient Initiative!

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