follow returnTo when hitting /login while already logged in

[david-crespo]

I tried to go to RFD 704 in a browser where I was logged out (I use Chrome for Google Meet and nothing else). I landed on https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/login?returnTo=/rfd/0704. I copied and pasted that URL into the browser I normally use because that's where I want to read it. I got taken to / instead of RFD 704. Turns out this is because we ignore returnTo. So in this change we stop doing that.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
rfd-site	Ready	Preview	Jun 30, 2026 8:33pm

[david-crespo]

This was just hardening against an edge case failure mode, classic GPT-5.5. Seems fine: low cost, covered in new unit test.

[fakemonster]

the previous regex was effectively /^\/rfd\/[0-9]{1,4}/ (\??.* simplifies to .*, .*$ in practice simplifies to nothing at all), so now this regex DOES explicitly match for RFD paths and not just "things that start with an RFD path". good fix

but: why does /discussion make the cut here, and not pdf, raw, etc? i could make an argument to tolerate any sub-path at all, honestly (as long as you see a slash after the rfd digits, it "looks right enough" within this context). would help to have some elaboration in the tests (or a commit message) of why discussion gets the special case, and perhaps to move the /raw example in the tests to the 'rejects non-RFD paths' test, since it's not really malformed. if we really do want to reject all other rfd sub-paths, that is

[david-crespo]

I saw this go by as a robot choice but didn't really think about why. Turns out it had a decent reason. /discussion gets included is because it's the only subpath the app currently constructs as a returnTo.

rfd-site/app/routes/rfd.$slug.discussion.tsx

Lines 25 to 28 in e05dd46

	// !rfd covers both non-existent and private RFDs for the logged-out user. In
	// both cases, once they log in, if they have permission to read it, they'll
	// get the redirect, otherwise they will get 404.
	if (!rfd && !user) throw redirect(`/login?returnTo=/rfd/${formatRfdNum(num)}/discussion`)

/raw defines a returnTo, but it goes to the RFD page, not /raw:

rfd-site/app/routes/rfd.$slug.raw.tsx

Lines 36 to 38 in e05dd46

	// If someone goes to a private RFD but they're not logged in, they will
	// want to log in and see it.
	if (!rfd && !user) throw redirect(`/login?returnTo=/rfd/${formatRfdNum(num)}`)

and /pdf just 404s if you hit it while logged out on a private RFD.

rfd-site/app/routes/rfd.$slug.pdf.tsx

Lines 19 to 22 in e05dd46

	const user = await authenticate(request)
	const rfd = await fetchRfdPdf(num, user)
	if (!rfd || rfd.content.length === 0) throw new Response('Not Found', { status: 404 })

This status quo doesn't really make sense — /raw and /pdf should also construct returnTo using their actual paths. So I fixed that in 8b7f1a5 and loosened the regex to allow any subpath.

[david-crespo]

Confirmed it works in prod.