3 ms·

Isn't that exactly what Quora is doing?

• buddydvd 15y ago
  OP's blog post says Quora is not doing that. It says Quora's redirecting to gigaom.com from http://www.quora.com/_/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom.com%2F2010%2F06%2F08%2Fhow-zynga-survived-farmville%2F&sig=4f01ab http://www.quora.com/_/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom.com%... instead of http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-computing http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-c.... The technique I described allows Quora to customize the referrer associated with an outbound link.
  • mkjones 15y ago
    Ah yes, I misread your post. The trouble with that approach is that you have to enumerate the dangerous params, and if the actual page URL needs a private parameter to work, you can't get rid of it.
    • buddydvd 15y ago
      Right, but you can always pass the canonical url to the redirector. That lets you avoid maintaining a whitelist/blacklist of query params. This should be trivial for Quora as most of their pages already contain the meta tag specifying the canonical url: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-computing" /> They just need to update their outbound link interceptor to take that version instead of the actual url.