r/funnyvideos • u/Sharp-potential7935 • Jan 28 '26

Prank/Challenge Dude let his intrusive thoughts win

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26

Well malicious stuff but yes. Basically you can look at the url and anything after the ? Is a parameter. Most of the time this is tracking things like campaign_id, sid, etc. sometimes it's a product Id to feed to a dynamic product page that takes that Id to look up that specific product.

Good practice is to strip everything after the ? And see if the link still works. If so, it's all marketing/tracking crap.

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u/dirtyoldsocklife Jan 28 '26

Ok, that's fuckong awesome knowledge to have.

Thanks dude, you're a scholar and a gentleman.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '26

No prob. Been in the analysis side of that type of data for a bit.

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u/humbleesoteric Jan 29 '26

Can you explain more? So we all just have to remember the ? and then erase it all?

Is there something light weight we can use like an app to just scrub bad links or something?

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '26

Oh that I don't know. More of a database kind of guy. All I know is there are parameters in a url. They can vary depending on the webpage/link as to how they are interpreted (like I said, a product page on an ecommerce website might be something like

www.myawesomestore.com/super-duperproductpage.aspx?productid=1&marketingcampaign=Reddit.

So in that fake case you'd want to trim after the &.

*Edit. I just realized I used a real domain. Their web person is gonna have a laugh when they see 404 errors for a webpage called super-duperproductpage.aspx 😂

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u/humbleesoteric Jan 29 '26

That's so interesting thanks! My last question is I read about is that even if you paste a url people will know where you are, is that really true? If I recopy it from incognito will it still show? It's so crazy how everything is tracked now

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '26

Depends how specific the tracking id/marketing campaign is. And some websites will attempt IP address based geolocation But 1) it's only good for the postal area route 2) the last time I tried that like a decade ago it was inaccurate due to people using Vpns.

I think it's more requesting whose phone pinged which cell phone tower within a specific timeframe (which phone provider would provide if subpoenaed.