Sebb

I agree that this is likely to become too much of a maintenance burden. Seems to me this would be better as a separate project (with its own package name)....

Works OK for me, see attached screenshot of thread.html 

If it is not needed, it should be deleted, otherwise it is just technical debt.

What changes would need to be made?

However, any installations that used the original generator will include duplicates, e.g. for messages sent to multiple lists. So the code must still support duplicates.

It's good that the new shortlinks are statistically unlikely to be duplicated. However if the old shortlink generator was ever used to shorten original ids in anything other than a...

Old shortlinks will work in the sense that they will find a match. However they won't work in the sense that they find the right match. The old shortlinks effectively...

> The new shortlink generator only allows shortlinks for IDs made by the newer generators (it checks). if the old is used, it falls back to full IDs for everything....

Also it's really hard to see what is happening in the script. Would it be possible to create a shell script instead?

Whilst the class seems to work well, I'm not convinced that there is a sufficient need for it. Every extra class adds to the maintenance load, so there needs to...