Very often state machines are the best representation for domain objects which have a life cycle. If you have a lot of user submitted content shared among other

Very often state machines are the best representation for domain objects which have a life cycle. If you have a lot of user submitted content shared among other users, a common set of states could be: "new", "approved-by-other-user", "verified-by-admin", "hidden", "promoted". I agree that at the HTTP level you shouldn't be using FSMs.