I did not know what those were for before seeing this but I remeber seeing “source=chat_gpt” next to a link to a source in a news article and thought that it was odd.
This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from. They’re usually not dynamic, and don’t contain anything about you personally. The example in the screenshot
utm_source=newsletteris probably added to all links in a company’s newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.I use an app called “Leon URL Cleaner” from F-Droid. Does a really good job removing tracking params, and only adds one extra step to sharing a URL.
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.
If you’re still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.
Most of my internetin’ is done on mobile, because I’m very rarely at my desk, and when I am, I’m normally working on school. Are there any solutions to handling this easily on mobile without having to manually erase part of the pasted link when I go to send it to someone? A few people have mentioned that’s it’s not 100% guaranteed that the anything after ? Is worthless, so I don’t know how to ensure I’m not breaking a link
I posted a comment above, but if you’re android, check out leon. Super easy to use.
Also leon
If you run across a link with a regular “?utm_source=…” , that can not tell people anything about you. It simply tells the website “register one click onto this article coming from this specific newsletter we sent out”. It does not tie this information to you.
With other tracking things, what is described here is absolutely possible though.
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.
whuh? querystrings are integral to things like pagination. they are by no means a negative thing.
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.
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.
There is.
?s=for a search, and you can combine it with other parameters such as date or taxonomy terms.
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)
hey you, yeah you, you’re finally awake
So annoying to always have to find out how far you can trim a URL before it breaks.
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”
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:
Nice try.
Happy cake day
There should be an extension that does this
Yep!
Only thing I want to see after a ? in a youtube url is t=4m20s
personally i like v=aO82NftCga to be in there as well
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
For Android users at least, I recommend the Léon URL Cleaner app, when you share a link from many common sources to the URL Cleaner, it removes all that tracking shit for you, and copies the cleaned link to the clipboard.
This belongs more on Technology and Privacy communities.
I guess it was posted here to reach a broader audience.
I’m upset, the tech and privacy communities need to step it up cause I’ve never seen this fact. I kinda knew URLs had a lot of junk, but I never knew what could be removed.
The way I’ve always figured it out is by deleting some, then loading the page in a different browser or an incognito window, and repeat until the URL is as minimal as possible, while still loading correctly. For websites you use regularly, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.
Brave for iOS has the Copy Clean Link option. There’s GNAT Cleaner from the App Store but I’ve never used it.
I tried adding screenshots but I haven’t been able to upload photos in almost a week.
ClearURLs was my go to on Firefox, I think it’s still great but it gave me trouble on a couple of sites because it modified the url in the address bar (it was like AliExpress and shopee, Chinese e-commerce sites that look like a web dev vomited, so I hardly blame ClearURLs)
Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
Thanks. I didn’t know about that. Although I tried doing it and the option was grayed out. Any idea what might be wrong? Do I need to change a setting or something? This was on youtube.
I don’t think YouTube actually has tracking parameters in the url normally, but if you use the share button then the youtu.be link will include the video ID as well tracking. But it looks like you can kinda use it there too if you select the link with tracking, it seems to detect that it’s a link and offers the clean link option when you right click it.
If you go to an Amazon item page then you should see it available when right clicking the address bar.
Firefox also now has “copy clean link” when you right click the url bar which also works great.
I am an avid and exclusive user of Firefox and I never discovered this because it never would have occurred to me in a million years to right click the URL bar for any reason. So I’ll be damned; there it is. (I always just lasso the relevant part myself and hit ctrl + c.)
I also use URLCheck on my phone. Made it the default browser and it pops up with options to clean the link and choose which browser to open it with
