Our timestamp format currently ends with seconds, milliseconds and a timezone marker, which means a fixed string of ":00.000Z" as signatures never have seconds (or milliseconds) and we always store in UTC. This adds an extra 8 or 16 bytes to every comment ID, which makes URLs unnecessarily long and adds to DB storage.
If we were to change the ID/name format again, places where the old format could be stored include
- In HTML caches for X days
- In discussiontools_subscription table (sub_item) - could be updated via a script, or we could just add code to support both formats
- In echo_event (type dt-subscribed-new-comment), event_extra stores comment name and ID which is used to render notification links
- In echo email notifications, the old style links will exist forever
- Some users have already started using our #coment-id format for "permalinking" via a gadget (although this has no promises of being an actual permalink yet, e.g. it doesn't survive archiving)
