Telling people to remove them isn’t very practical. Educating people is step 1, but step 2 is finding a browser extension or browser that scrubs the identifiers from URLs. You will inevitably forget to remove the tracker from the url if you do it manually.
“everything after the ? Symbol can be removed without issue” is a bold statement to make. Reminds me when the TV news had a specialist telling people to look at urls before clicking and check if it ends with “.php” as that would mean it is a virus.
Youtube.com/watch?v=[Video ID]
No no no no, keep em up, I can hack them and decrypt and do nasty things with that silly part of
codelink, to learn so much about our lovely friendship. And I promise I would never use that to harm You, really! hahahahahahahahaaOh source from newsletters? emails? oh that means You actively are using email adres, do any big spam company want validated email adres they can spam on? yeah, sure, 0.30€ each! (afaik, black market value is 100-600€ per 1000 valid addresses, just searched)
Tbh, unsure if si=Aa1Uc_fRHXC0ay85 or similars can be decrypted, or are just individual, one time identificators, never tried, but bet some do know how to pull value out of them.
Not everything after the
?can be removed. Obvious and well known example, YouTube videos use the video as part of the query parameters (on non shortened URLs). https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQOne small error on an otherwise very useful post! 💜
Fun fact, YouTube has backwards comparability for its video links, so https://youtube.com/w/dQw4w9WgXcQ will go to the same video (granted, it will change format to the up to date one, but it is one way to go to a yt video without URL arguments)
Even better: https://youtu.be/PtSGclOlVmg
This is what I meant by the “non shortened” ones. If you’re using it through the app you can only press share to get the link and that’s how it comes when you press share. (Or if you press share on the website instead of copying the URL from the address bar.)
Even better: PeerTube or InternetArchive or (Web)Torrents but definitely not a Google website fueled by surveillance capitalism.
For a viewer: serious lack of content
For a creator: extremely unlikely to make a living
I want them to succeed but it’s an unfortunate position
Be the change you want to see. Here is my instance https://video.benetou.fr/ even if nobody cares, I tried.
Saying “be the change you want to see” doesn’t resolve any of the raised concerns.
You don’t think the link I give helps potential viewers by showing there is content out there?
Call me back when the experience as a content creator is not a nightmare, the experience as a user browsing for content is not a nightmare, when it can handle the load of an even moderately popular video.
The issue with streaming video online is not a technical one; making a “clone” of youtube, anyone can do so (and indeed, peertube exists). The issue with streaming video online is that if it gets traction, you need a lot of bandwidth and processing power to make it available when it needs to be available. One-two instances and “hopping P2P picks up” does not cut it.
And, as usual when anyone says anything bad about peertube: the idea is great, but almost by construction it lacks what’s needed to be a valid replacement for centralized, yet HUGE existing platforms: traction, and a truckload of CDN-like instances that can handle the load. If someone putting highly anticipated content online could just “put” their video somewhere and send a link so people can watch it, immediately, and without issue, some would likely do so. Unfortunately, we’re very far from that yet.
I did some live streams in the past. I share the link to my instance below. I can’t speak for large audiences.
I judge people based on whether they can understand youtube (which you should be changing to invidious or something else anyway) urls. It’s a useful and very short way to see if people have ever paid attention to repeated patterns. The moment I saw the t=XYs, I was amazed.
There is also copy clean link option in firefox and brave
So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.
Typically anything after the “?”. That’s where the parameters live. There are always exceptions.
There are many URLs that require parameters to load a resource (and aren’t necessarily tracking anything). With YouTube’s non-shortened links (for example), the video ID is after the
?, but is usually (but not always) immediately after.This:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQCan be shortened to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQBut no shorter.
(actually, you can remove the
www.but that’s not relevant for illustrating my point)LOL: thank you Voyager or Lemmy.world for stripping it even from my inline code.
Here’s what I was trying to post:
But no shorter
yes, YouTube has shorter URL schemes, but given the scheme I was showing, the part after the
?can’t be removed
Mh5GJlFUCKgjo7ufdb2
Nice try.
Happy cake day
I mean that’s part of the fun of surfing the web, you get to play a fun puzzle game of “How to Lobotomize a URL”
Might be able to use a Redirect Checker, like:
or
Wonder if this helps with TikTok who has these custom URLs that don’t have parameters, just creepy personalized ones
There should be an extension that does this
uBlock Origin with the appropriate filter list will do it for you, like this one: https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt
This tip really doesn’t let me down, turns around and desert me
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
Everything after the ? can be safely removed
This is usually true but but not always. There’s often times when a URL query like that is used to choose the page to load. I believe wordpress does this
Only on “I have really bad SEO” kinds of blogs. Query strings have been considered a negative thing for many many years.
Youtube has the video ID as a query parameter, to use the most obvious example…
whuh? querystrings are integral to things like pagination. they are by no means a negative thing.
It’s really weird how SEO snake oil salesmen have broken the web.
The “no query parameter” rule is such a dogma to the cult that your normal tooling for pages has to go through some weird ass hoops so that it can show up instead as a slug in the URL.
I hate SEO and SEO peddlers
I wouldn’t call it integral, pagination query parameters can be in the url params just as easily as in the querystring
Pagination query params can be in the URL params, but that’s not normal at all. They’re pretty much always use query params, and it’s very reasonable to do so. Filtering, search, and pagination all typically go in query params.
that’s very hard to make idiomatic, and if it’s in the querystring it’s easier to change manually because you can annotate each entry more easily.
Most systems these days do rewrites (like Apache mod_rewrite) to keep the query parameters out of the URL. Even for pagination. It’s not necessarily on by default though because they don’t know what environment you’re in so you need to do things to enable it (like copy a .htaccess file and enable it in settings).
Not everybody cares for SEO BS
WordPress uses a taxonomic system you choose with a mix of the Settings page and how you organize your template hierarchy. To my knowledge there is no out of the box query url functionality in the core system.
Sometimes I’ll post a picture straight from a duckduckgo search, and it doesn’t work without the stuff after the ?
(I’m also not sure how long the url is valid for, so I try not to do this too often)
They are called query parameters and they are used for other things as well. So you can remove the ones you see similar to these but sometimes there might be important stuff you need to get the page to load in those parameters.
After removing them (or even if there was nothing to remove) I test out links I’m sending in a private browser window to check that they would work for other people.
Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There’s browser extensions for that.
Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.I honestly couldn’t determine if it was a typo or not, but it’s not “fast” but “vast majority.”
my brain autocorrected it to “vast,” but I like “fast majority” as a phrase
Can I ask how do use this? Do I just copy/paste this into the “my filters” tab in uBlock? ;
Go to the “Filter lists” tab in the dashboard. At the bottom of the list click “Import” and paste the URL ( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt ) in the box. Then click “Apply Changes” to save it.
Thank you kindly! 🏅
I’ve been using URL Check on Android to clean links of crap like this.
There’s also Léon the URL Cleaner.
I usually just do it because shorter links look better than 30 lines of crap
Right? The fact that this is an extra bit of tracking information I don’t want makes this an easy sell for anyone looking for a reason to do this, but for me it’s because it just makes links uglier.
It’s not always nefarious.
I work for a non-profit. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the click rate on a mass message.
We don’t provide data to third parties and use a self-hosted oss analytics platform.
So I think folks should understand tracking and manage it but it’s not all bad. Just almost always bad. Really bad.
Worse: a lot of links can’t be fixed or modified since they use click-through services to obscure the destination.
I’m a web developer in a marketing department and agreed UTM tags aren’t really nefarious. We generally use them to track campaigns, and to see the effectiveness of our paid campaigns. (As in how much of a return on investment did we have, are people continuing to traverse the site after hitting the landing page, etc) That said those codes generally don’t give us any info about the user other than what parts of the site you are hitting, (which we can find out through other means anyway). There are tools out there which can give us a creepy amount of data about the users on the site, but UTMs aren’t it.
Removing them when sending out links is good practice as you probably only really need a fraction of the characters in order to get to the site, so your links are cleaner, you look like less of an idiot, and ironically marketers will end up having cleaner data (I doubt you care about this, but it’s true.)
That said, if you really want to prevent sites from getting your data when browsing turning off JavaScript in your browser would probably have the biggest impact.
