Open Lore NetworkOLN
Network/Journal/Network Url And Namespace Architecture
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Entry 026

Network URL and namespace architecture

Date
2026-06-05
Status
Decided
Authority
Creator (infrastructure-level)

Decision

Path-based URLs on the single apex (Entry 025). Subdomains are reserved for exactly two purposes: the Entry 001 franchise "graduation" escape hatch, and security-isolated origins for untrusted user content (Entry 027). No subdomains for ordinary franchises, communities, or users.

  • Franchises: bare slug at root — theopenlore.net/lotr/. Safe because franchise slugs are governance-created (curated), guarded by a reserved-word list rather than self-serve registration.
  • Canon is the default, unmarked namespace. Canonical (Commons, Layer 9) entity pages sit directly under the franchise, by type. Type segments are plural, and the type set is a controlled vocabulary (see G-048).
  • Cross-franchise / real-world entities are network-level, addressed at reserved top-level type paths (e.g. /person/). In-universe entities stay under their franchise.
  • Non-canon surfaces are marked. Community group-spaces nest under the franchise behind a marker — /g/ (chosen provisionally over /c/, which reads as "canon").
  • Members are entities too (Entry 027), addressed at the apex root with an @ prefix. The @ fences the self-serve handle namespace off from curated paths and avoids any clash with the /person/ canon type.
  • Slugs use hyphens, never underscores.
  • Views and facets are query parameters with rel=canonical back to the clean URL. Crawl efficiency is bought with URL hygiene, server speed, and sitemaps — never host-splitting.

Canonical map

theopenlore.net/                                   network home + marketing
theopenlore.net/@darthg                            member profile (Atlas)
theopenlore.net/@darthg/journal/                   private drafts (noindex)
theopenlore.net/@darthg/the-ring-as-addiction      a Creator Home work

theopenlore.net/person/ian-mckellen                network-level real-world entity

theopenlore.net/lotr/                              franchise home
theopenlore.net/lotr/characters/gandalf            canon entity (Commons, unmarked)
theopenlore.net/lotr/locations/rivendell
theopenlore.net/lotr/artifacts/the-one-ring
theopenlore.net/lotr/characters/gandalf#fact-0007  a citable Fact

theopenlore.net/lotr/g/rings-of-firelings/         community (marked, not canon)
theopenlore.net/lotr/g/rings-of-firelings/cosplay/weta-helm-build

theopenlore.net/lotr/characters/gandalf?view=loreline   rel=canonical → clean URL

Reasoning

Reddit, not Fandom. Governance autonomy is not brand separation (Entry 001). One canonical home per concept, with communities nested as paths, means the platform never bifurcates into competing duplicate wikis — Fandom's characteristic failure.

Bounded namespaces stay collision-safe. Every curated name — franchise slugs, entity types, network type paths, system routes — is minted through governance, so collisions are resolved at creation time. The one self-serve namespace, handles, is fenced behind @. That asymmetry is why franchises need no prefix but users get one.

Canon-as-default gives the AEO crown jewels the shortest, cleanest, highest-authority URLs and keeps their structure consistent for answer engines. Characters are spent only to mark the lower-authority zones.

Query-param facets + canonical prevent the duplicate-content and crawl-budget sprawl that kills large UGC sites; host-splitting to chase crawl budget would forfeit the authority consolidation this whole architecture rests on.

Supersedes

The loredoor.com host and the /canon/ path segment in Entry 001's patterns. Updates G-031.