It's apparently a valid URL, despite it being malformed in my opinion

I've had a few [1] posts [2] make it to the front page of Lobsters [3]. Lobsters supports webmention [4], yet I never received a webmention for those two posts. I checked the logs and yes, they were received but I rejected them with a “bad request.” It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found the root cause—the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of my post was, accoring to my code, invalid. Lobsters was sending in a URL of the form https://boston.conman.org//2023/01/02.1—notice the two slashes in front of the path. My code was having none of that.

I'm not sure why Lobsters was sending a URL of that form as previous [5] webmentions [6] worked fine, but when I checked previous submissions to Lobsters [7] I saw some of the links had a double slash in the path portion. As it's considered valid by the What Working Group? “living standard,” [8] I ended up having to accept what I consider a malformed URL.

Sigh.

=> [1] /boston/2023/01/02.1 | [2] /boston/2023/01/08.1 | [3] https://lobste.rs/ | [4] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ | [5] /boston/2022/12/14.1 | [6] /boston/2022/12/21.1 | [7] https://lobste.rs/domains/boston.conman.org | [8] https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#urls

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