Re-use the custom URL of a deleted notebook

Hi everyone,
First of all, I’m really loving Observable - thank you for building it.

Secondly, I have a use case or a possible bug and I’m not sure how to work around it. I wanted to re-assign the custom URL of a notebook to another notebook, so I placed the first one in the Trash and emptied the Trash. However, when I go to set the custom URL of the new notebook, it tells me that the custom URL is still in use. Wouldn’t trashing a notebook make it’s custom URL available for re-use? Or is there a time delay or garbage collection process going on?

Any advice very much appreciated,
Kind regards, Kathy

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Even though the notebook is trashed, we reserve its associated URL (slug) to prevent it from being reused by future notebooks; the intent of this design is prevent links and imports from unexpectedly changing from one notebook to another. (The URL uniquely identifies a notebook, and we don’t want that to change in meaning.)

To move a custom URL from one notebook to another, you must reset the custom URL from the old notebook (which might break existing links and imports) and then apply the custom URL to the new notebook.

If you’ve trashed the old notebook and emptied the trash, you will no longer be able to do this yourself since the notebook is deleted. You can however email support and ask for the URL to be cleared so that it is available again for new notebooks.

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This makes a lot of sense, and I can see the reasoning behind that workflow - thank you so much!

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