Question

Let’s say I’m building a web application whose user pages can be found at http://example.com/NAME. What’s the best way to make sure the username doesn’t conflict with a reserved word (e.g. ‘about’, ‘contact’, etc.)? I can think of two ways:

• Maintain a list somewhere in my code. This is great and all, but means I have another piece of code I have to edit if I decide to, say, change the “about” page to “aboutus”.
• Request the URI (e.g. http://example.com/someusername) and check if it exists (doesn’t return a 404). This feels kind of like a hack, but on the other hand it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. On the other hand, I can’t reserve anything without making a page for it.

What would be the best way to go about this? Manual validation of usernames is not an option. Thanks!

EDIT: I forgot to mention, the username has to go at the root, like this:

http://example.com/USERNAME

Not like this:

http://example.com/users/USERNAME

Hence why I’m asking this question. This is for technical reasons, don’t ask.

Answer 1

In the interest of completeness, if you can’t change the routing. Another possibility is to have your user routes and your non-user routes have a programmatic distinction. For example, if you appended a '_' to the end of each of your user routes, then you can make sure that users are located at: http://example.com/NAME_ and the other route would never end in '_'