Am 24.07.2018 um 04:17 schrieb dick balaska:

>>> One of my fantasies is to get the newsgroups to emit an url for a
>>> message that is less than 200 chars long.
...
> And *another* weird thing, often the povray newsgroup links work even if
> the last 3-4 characters wrap.  I always do the tinyurl thing to help my
> fellow povers avoid the wrapping nonsense. (which is annoying because it
> anonymizes the url. I'm really sending you to pornhub.)

The anatomy of a link to a message in the web interface is as follows:

    http://news.povray.org/<GROUP>/message/<ID>/#<ID>

where <GROUP> is the name of the newsgroup, and <ID> is the message ID
(always starting with `%3C` and ending with `%3E`, which represent the
characters `<` and `>`, respectively).

Note that the last portion of the URL is a /fragment/ (recognizable by
the leading `#`), i.e. a specific location within the referenced page,
instructing the browser to scroll down on that page accordingly.

If only the fragment portion is garbled, the web page will still load
fine; the browser will just not scroll down to the fragment because it
can't find it. (As a matter of fact, in practice that's even the
behaviour when the fragment `#<ID>` is present and intact: The
single-message pages do not have any fragments at all.)

This also means that you can strip the fragment portion from the URL
entirely to make it shorter.

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