What's your problem with it?

Bots, browsers that preload URLs, caching (both browser and backend and everything in between), the whole infrastructure of the Web that assumes GET never mutates and is always safe to repeat or serve from cache.

Using GET also circumvents browser security stuff like CORS, because again the browser assumes GET never mutates.

So why is there no problem with vote/flag/vouche on HN being GET endpoints?

Then that does not conform to the HTTP spec. GET endpoints must be safe, idempotent, cachable. Opening up a site to cases were web crawlers/scrapers may wreak havoc.

There is, it's bad. Luckily votes aren't very crucial.

Votes are crucial. HN goes to great lengths to prevent votes that do not stem from real user intent.

See this post for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761897

Quotes:

"Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years"

"I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this"

Indeed, user embedded pictures can fire GET requests while can not make POST requests. But this is not a problem if you don't allow users to embed pictures, or you authenticate the GET request somehow. Anyway GET requests are just fine.

The same would have worked with a POST endpoint.

The story url only would have to point to a web page that creates the upvote post request via JS.

That runs into CORS protections though.

CORS is a lot less strict around GET as it is supposed to be safe.

Nope, it would not have been prevented by CORS.

CORS prevents reading from a resource, not from sending the request.

If you find that surprising, think about that the JS could also have for example created a form with the vote page as the target and clicked on the submit button. All completely unrelated to CORS.

Even mdn calls it "violating the CORS security rules" instead of SOP rules: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/COR...

Anyway, this is lame low effort trolling for some unknown purpose. Stop it.

That any bot crawling your website is going to click on your links and inadvertently mutate data.

Reading your original comment I was thinking "Sure, as long as you have a good reason of doing it this way anything goes" but I realized that you prefer to do it this way because you don't know any better.

If you rely on the HTTP method to authenticate users to mutate data, you are completely lost. Bots and humans can send any method they like. It's just a string in the request.

Use cookies and auth params like HN does for the upvote link. Not HTTP methods.

You say that, but there are lots of security features like SameSite=Lax that are built on the assumption that GET requests are harmless.

> If you rely on the HTTP method to authenticate users to mutate data, you are completely lost

I don't know where you are getting that from but it's the first time I've heard of it.

If your link is indexed by a bot, then that bot will "click" on your links using the HTTP GET method—that is a convention and, yes, a malicious bot would try to send POST and DELETE requests. For the latter, this is why you authenticate users but this is unrelated to the HTTP verb.

> Use cookies and auth params like HN does for the upvote link

If it uses GET, this is not standard and I would strongly advise against it except if it's your pet project and you're the only maintainer.

Follow conventions and make everyone's lives easier, ffs.

There was a post about Garage opener I read here sometime back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964907