I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

I build a lot of internal applications, and one of my golden UI rules is that a user should be able to share their URL and other users should be able to see exactly what the sender did.

So if you have a dashboard or visualization where the user can add filters or configurations, I have all of their settings saved automatically in the URL. It's visible, it's obvious, it's easy, it's convenient.

>There is also a moral question here about whether it is okay to modify a given URL on behalf of the user in order to insert a referral query string into it. I think it isn't.

These dogmatic technical screeds are all so weird to me. They usually reveal more about the authors lack of experience or imagination than provide a useful truism.

Back in the Stone Age, we called these “Webrings,” but they weren’t as fancy.

One of the issues that I faced, while developing an open-source application framework, was that hosting that used FastCGI, would not honor Auth headers, so I was forced to pass the tokens in the query. It sucked, because that makes copy/paste of the Web address a real problem. It would often contain tokens. I guess maybe this has been fixed?

In the backends that I control, and aren’t required to make available to any and all, I use headers.

I'm going to be honest, I was pretty geared up to have a contrarian opinion until I looked at the standards but they're actually pretty clear, a 404 could be a proper response to unexpected query string; query string is as much part of the URL API as the path is and I think pretty much everyone can acknowledge that just tacking random stuff onto the path would be ill advised and undefined behavior.

[0]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#application/x-www-form-urlencod...

[1]: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-class

His site returns (I think incorrectly) a 414 if a request includes a query string. If this protest is meant to advocate for the user, who presumably wasn't able to manage that string in the first place, why would you penalize them for it being there?

Why not just use it as a cue to tell users how they can make this decision themselves (e.g. through browser tools)?

A link that is "https:// web.site" is fine.

A link that is "https:// web.site?via=another.site" is fine.

A link that is "https:// web.site?fbm=avddjur5rdcbbdehy63edjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63edaaaddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednzzddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63ednddjur5rdcbbdehy63edn"

is annoying as shit and I need to literally apologize to people after sending it if I forget to manually redact the query string. Don't abuse this.

Example: The Browser is a well known link aggregation paid periodical. I subscribe, and every 1 in 10 or 20 links I clicked, it'd just break outright and I'd have to tediously edit the URL to fix it (assuming the website didn't do a silent ninja URL edit and make it impossible for me to remember what URL I opened possibly days or weeks ago in a tab and potentially fix it). This was annoying enough to bother me regularly, but not enough to figure out a workaround.

Why? ...Because TB was injecting a '?referrer=The_Browser' or something, and the receiving website server got confused by an invalid query and errored out. 'Wow, how careless of The Browser! Are they really so incompetent as to not even check their URLs before mailing an issue out to paying subscribers?'

I wondered the same thing, and I eventually complained to them. It turns out, they did check all their URLs carefully before emailing them out... emphasis on 'before', which meant that they were checking the query-string-free versions, which of course worked fine. (This is a good example of a testing failure due to not testing end-to-end or integration testing: they should have been testing draft emails sent to a testing account, to check for all possible issues like MIME mangling, not just query string shenanigans.)

After that they fixed it by making sure they injected the query string before they checked the URLs. (I suggested not injecting it at all, but they said that for business reasons, it was too valuable to show receiving websites exactly how much traffic TB was driving to them on net, because referrers are typically stripped from emails and reshares and just in general - this, BTW, is why the OP suggestion of 'just set a HTTP referrer header!' is naive and limited to very narrow niches where you can be sure that you can, in fact, just set the referrer header.)

But this error was affecting them for god knows how long and how many readers and how many clicks, and they didn't know. Because why would they? The most important thing any programmer or web dev should know about users is that "they may never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... (excerpts & more examples: https://gwern.net/ref/chevalier-boisvert-2019 ). No matter how badly broken a feature or service or URL may be, the odds are good that no user will ever tell you that. Laziness, public goods, learned helplessness / low standards, I don't know what it is, but never assume that you are aware of severe breakage (or vice-versa, as a user, never assume the creator is aware of even the most extreme problem or error).

Even the biggest businesses.... I was watching a friend the other day try to set up a bank account in Central America, and clicking on one of the few banks' websites to download the forms on their main web page. None of the form PDF download links worked. "That's not a good sign", they said. No, but also not as surprising as you might think - the bank might have no idea that some server config tweak broke their form links. After all, at least while I was watching, my friend didn't tell them about their problem either!

Yes, let's unilaterally decide that query strings are bad because one website (ab)uses query strings to load different fonts.

It's the query strings that are the problem, not the website!

jfc.

Look, I'm against utm fragments as much as the next guy, but let's not throw away a perfectly good thing because tracking is evil.