Best practices and advice how to shorten links to comments when including them in other comments? Can I safely drop the noredirect=1?

Question

When adding links to comments within other comments I often want to shorten them so that I can add fit more plain text within the character limit.

I usually start by removing the words of the title and one forward slash, and sometimes remove the noredirect bit, but I recognize that I don't really know what I'm doing.

Is it possible to state best practices and offer some advice on how to best shorten links to comments when including them in other comments? What does noredirect=1 do for example, and what are the consequences of removing it?

Working examples that appear to me to be ripe for shortening:

• https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/54293/is-there-any-demonstrated-or-even-proposed-technology-that-can-sterilize-a-space?noredirect=1#comment177960_54293
• https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/41023/why-cant-we-build-a-huge-stationary-optical-telescope-inside-a-depression-simil/41027?noredirect=1#comment83925_41027

Answer 1

There's an even shorter undocumented scheme for shortening comment URLs, that makes for links even shorter than Cave Johnson's answer: just take the comment ID, i.e. the first number in the #comment[x]_[y] fragment, and put it into /posts/comments/[x].

Examples:

• https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/54293/is-there-any-demonstrated-or-even-proposed-technology-that-can-sterilize-a-space?noredirect=1#comment177960_54293

• https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/41023/why-cant-we-build-a-huge-stationary-optical-telescope-inside-a-depression-simil/41027?noredirect=1#comment83925_41027

become:

• https://space.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/177960
• https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/posts/comments/83925

respectively.

If the comment you're linking to is on the same site, you can drop the full URL portion and link to it as a relative URL, so these URLs would then become the following:

• /posts/comments/177960
• /posts/comments/83925

These only work if the linked comment is on the same site as the comment you're posting, as they omit the site part of the URL. Do note that such relative links will break if the question is subsequently migrated, so only use them if the question is older than 60 days or you're sure it won't be migrated.

Answer 2

It looks like I was able to get the comment link to work even when I removed the title segment from the urls. So I changed

• https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/54293/is-there-any-demonstrated-or-even-proposed-technology-that-can-sterilize-a-space?noredirect=1#comment177960_54293

• https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/41023/why-cant-we-build-a-huge-stationary-optical-telescope-inside-a-depression-simil/41027?noredirect=1#comment83925_41027

to:

• https://space.stackexchange.com/q/54293?noredirect=1#comment177960_54293

• https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/41023?noredirect=1#comment83925_41027

Also note I changed /questions/ to /q/ to shorten the urls further.

I guess that removing the noredirect=1 part will cause the url to redirect to a duplicate post if the question has been closed as a duplicate and the the user is not logged in/anonymous (or possibly below a certain reputation?), which could result in an undesired effect.