Make URL-cleaning configurable?

jducoeur

I upgraded Orion this morning, and now see the "Copy Cleaned Page URL" option -- thank you!

That said, in the very first example I tried, it was greyed out. I suspect that's because none of the parameters are known trackers, so it's not critical to be able to clean it. But it's still pretty full of junk: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/what-im-learning-from-maha?publication_id=281219&post_id=165129290&isFreemail=false&r=nnnnnn&triedRedirect=true

Basically everything after the ? is junk -- not damaging per se, but empirically all unnecessary, and I prefer not to include it when I'm sharing links to this site. (Which I do frequently.) I'm especially concerned about that opaque r parameter (which is why I've replaced the value with nnnnnn here) -- I don't know what that is, but I could easily believe it's a personal identifier of some sort.

So it would be nice (and I acknowledge that it's not earth-shakingly important) to be able to configure what "cleaning" means, probably on a per-domain basis.

Hard to say exactly what this might look like, but my first-cut guess at a UX to try would be a per-domain Setting, which could be called up by a hotkey for the current page, listing the parameters that are shown on the page and allowing one to disable them on a granular basis, as well as a simple "Clean all parameters" option (which I would probably use for this site).

yokoffing

Or convert rules to clean links on demand: e.g., https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt

jducoeur

Another example, while I think of it: https://stonemaiergames.com/interview-with-kickstarters-new-head-of-games/?lid=nnnnnnnnnnnn&ref=ksr_email_mktg_category_newsletter_games (again, obscuring the suspicious-looking lid parameter).

It's worth calling out that my primary use case is not Facebook (which I suspect some folks are focused on), but rather email lists. I'm on many of these (in practice, they're my primary source of "push" information from sites I follow), and nearly all of them have useful links that including what I suspect are tracking parameters. It's hard to be certain, but I'm more comfortable with eliding them when I share those links.

Yannick

I understand the problem well. In some cases, it's about cleaning the URL for sharing, while in others, it's just about removing tracking, as some parameters are essential. But how can one know, without trying, if essential parameters might be removed?

I see two options:

copying the address with no parameters at all (risky)
copying the address cleaned of trackers

What do you think?

jducoeur

I could see either way, but honestly, for most of the use cases I'm thinking about, simply removing all parameters works fine. (And is what I do in practice.) Being able to set that as a flag per-domain would help me significantly.