[Mailman-Developers] [Bug 985149] Add List-Post value to permalink hash input

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Thanks!

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Jeff Breidenbach <jeff at jab.org> wrote:
>> 0. Assume a 10 million message archive.
>> 1. What percentage of permalinks need another click?
>> 2. What percentage of permalinks will result in a list of more than 10 matches?
>
> Ignoring cross posts, for a 4 character hash:
>
> 1. Approximately 90%
>  2. Approximately 50%

Too high.

> Ignoring cross posts, for a 13 character hash:
>
> 1. Effectively 0%
> 2. Effectively 0%

Way too low because of "7 plus/minus 2".  As a strawman suggestion,
I'd say that once you get down to 5% and 0.1% respectively, you're
done because in many contexts cross-posts will bring you up by a
similar order of magnitude anyway.

For five-character hash, I get 13% and 0% and for six, 0.4% and 0%.  I
think 1 in 8 messages is probably more than I want to ask users for an
extra click, especially if cross-posts are kicking in substantially
too.  So six looks to be the sweet spot.

So I'm convinced that a shorter hash makes a lot of sense.

Steve