When converting a post to a comment, make it easier to specify the target post

[cellio]

meta:292327

The mod tool "convert (post) to comment" requires a post ID for where to move it to. This has to be the actual ID, meaning a number; if you paste in the raw URL, the form misbehaves because it's expecting a number.

The "Copy Link" button on posts only provides URLs, not post IDs.

We could ¹ add a third option to "Copy Link" for the post ID (which is not a link), though most people won't ever need the post ID so this is adding clutter. Ideally we'd instead make the other end, the place where you specify the target in the convert tool, easier to use.

On the surface, it seems it would be easiest to accept a URL and extract the numeric ID. But a comment on the linked post suggests that this might add technical debt, as we could no longer use built-in form validation and would have to write our own. (I'm not equipped to evaluate that issue.)

A nicer UX would be for the tool to provide a list somehow and let you select one -- no validation required, but that feels like a lot more development effort.

Let's figure out which approach is the best tradeoff of functionality and effort, and then do that.

Footnotes

1. This is the exclusive "we". I tried to do that but couldn't get the "copy" part of the button on the new option to work. Maybe this is easy for someone with more HTML clues? ↩