7 ms·
Probably the worst URL scheme ever
[english version] http://www.bvb.de/?Z%1B%E4%F4%9D
Can anyone point to any advantage to have unreadable URLs like on the linked page?
- pkhamre 14y agoBest football club in the world with word URL scheme in the world?
- royalsporks 14y agoUnique one!!
- dexcs 14y agoWorst website hoster ever: http://www.fcbayern.telekom.de/de/splash.php http://www.fcbayern.telekom.de/de/splash.php
- sebslomski 14y agoNice try. See you crying in 3 weeks.
- jakub_g 14y agoCan anyone tell the advantages of having unreadable URLs like this? The only thing I can think of is reducing bandwidth usage through short URLs :)
- Ovid 14y agoAnd reducing bandwidth via a brilliant anti-SEO strategy. * Useless URLS? Check. * Eye-gougingly ugly design? Check. * Densely packed content with tiny font? Check. And have lots of fun reading the source.
- twistedpair 14y agoYou've got to go green by conserving bits. You can use up to a radix of 30 I believe in JS, so why use those pesky base 10 values when you can go base 30 with no additional overhead? Heck, use base 62 for the easily url passable values too. Just 4 chars to encode your 14M WP articles. Think of the bits!
- dbbolton 14y agoSo, this page is named ?_(null)çô(null) ? How does that even begin to make sense?
- hosay123 14y agoIt's an underscore followed by 4 bytes, possibly the integer 2650072859 or 468186269. If they're intentionally trying to obfuscate their URLs to prevent crawling, it might be further encrypted somehow.
- lysol 14y agoThis is nitpicking, but the worst URL scheme is actually smb:
- raverbashing 14y agoAnd the worse mime type is an unfunny one.
- helipad 14y agoLook! Another fixed-width, left-aligned German website. Brimming with nostalgia here.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- XarotheOne 14y agoHaha that is epic. EDIT: I apologise for the really bad comment. I have read the rules now and will only put high quality posts from now on. Thankyou.
- endgame 14y agohttp://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=epic http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=epic
- piqufoh 14y agoouch
- PavlovsCat 14y agoThank you. I often wanted to write a rant about the epidemic usage of that word, but now I see I don't have to (I can just link to it, like a cow ^^)
- XarotheOne 14y agoActually thanks for that, I didn't realise so many people were against it but I shall refrain from using the word "epic" in a context that it should be used.
- sageikosa 14y agoThat page is epic.
- XarotheOne 14y agoHaha that is epic.
- cedricd 14y agoThe elephant in the room here of course is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=b7VO4wED8MRumCeiX5fCnF https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=b7VO4wED8MRumCeiX5fCnF
- hackerboos 14y agoTrue. This hash should be appended like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/page3/x?fnid=b7VO4wED8MRumCeiX5fCnF https://news.ycombinator.com/page3/x?fnid=b7VO4wED8MRumCeiX5...
- ancarda 14y agoI never understood why HN has such a peculiar URL for accessing pages. It times out after a while too, is that to stop crawlers?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Robin_Message 14y agoThey are ids to lookup closures in a database. They time out to stop the database overflowing ;) It's called continuation-based web development [1], popular with Lisp and Smalltalk-based web servers (because who else has continuations?) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#In_Web_development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation#In_Web_development
- jgrahamc 14y agoThere's no database. EDIT: to all the people arguing with me. Read the source code to Hacker News. (= fns* (table) fnids* nil timed-fnids* nil) ; count on huge (expt 64 10) size of fnid space to avoid clashes (def new-fnid () (check (sym (rand-string 10)) ~fns* (new-fnid))) (def fnid (f) (atlet key (new-fnid) (= (fns* key) f) (push key fnids*) key)) (mac afnid (f) `(atlet it (new-fnid) (= (fns* it) ,f) (push it fnids*) it)) They are in memory. Which is why they expire randomly when the HN process is restarted.
- masnick 14y agoLinkedIn URLs are by far the worst. For example, the first profile that came up when I searched for Paul Graham: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23081590&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=v2DV&locale=en_US&srchid=b2875520-dc20-4e1a-a17b-17460da676f9-0&srchindex=1&srchtotal=3061&goback=%2Efps_PBCK_Paul+graham+_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*2_*1_Y_*1_*1_*1_false_1_R_*1_*51_*1_*51_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2&pvs=ps&trk=pp_profile_name_link&_mSplash=1 http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23081590&authTyp...
- joosters 14y agoYes, all those *2s could easily have been optimised into a left shift operator.
- masnick 14y agoOh so the *2s have some sort of meaning beyond random URL garbage? Please explain! I've always been curious.
- aerique 14y agoNo, I think it is just a joke: if you parse "*2" as "times two" you could optimize it in code by shifting the bits left since bit shifting operations are cheaper than multiplication. #b0001 = 1 #b0010 = 2 #b0100 = 4 #b1000 = 8
- jnardiello 14y agoEhy, i see nothing wrong here.
- joosters 14y agoTake THAT, evil web crawlers! Maybe they are trying to get poorly-written spiders to crash when they hit the site?
- jakub_g 14y agoActually when you google site:www.bvb.de there are some readable URLs (not sure how they got there), upon navigating to which they do 302 redirects.
- joosters 14y agoIt's just like tinyurl.com, but in reverse :)
- X4 14y agohahaha :D Let's put the tech sensation aside. I'm glad to know that the HN Folk have a good sense of humor :) BTW: you can add multiple routes pointing to the same url, but allow only the SEO URLs to be indexed. This keeps the cryptic URLs for the entertainment of the Users/Crawlers.
- joosters 14y agoHow would you do this? (Leaving aside the question of 'why?') I suppose you could try blocking crawlers from the raw URLs with an aggressive robots.txt and then put a sitemap (with friendly/SEO URLs in) somewhere for them to discover instead. Would that work? Paranoid web spiders could flag the site as suspicious, though. Such schemes might make it seem like the website is presenting one view to the spider, and another to real visitors. Almost like it was trying to hide malware from a scanner.
- alanh 14y agoMy understanding is that you can use e.g. "rel=canonical" links to tell bots what the indexable URL of the current page is. Other tools in the box include UA sniffing and sitemap.xml.
- msturm 14y agoNot sure what it is but the URLs on the japanese BVB site look better: http://www.bvb.jp/ http://www.bvb.jp/
- homosaur 14y agoWhat the heck, this site is reasonable, attractive, and legible, why is this not the MAIN SITE?!?
- bdg 14y agoMy first thought when I see this: This is a band-aid to try and prevent an XSS or SQLi flaw somewhere on the site.
- hamoid 14y agoI still think the one used by the Spanish Congress is worse. URL for legal document 162/000609: http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Iniciativas?_piref73_2148295_73_1335437_1335437.next_page=/wc/servidorCGI&CMD=VERLST&BASE=IW10&FMT=INITXDSS.fmt&DOCS=1-1&DOCORDER=FIFO&OPDEF=ADJ&QUERY=%28162%2F000609*.NDOC.%29 http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/...
- masklinn 14y agoLegal portals are generally gasbage, here's the french one for Article L511-1 of the environmental code: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle=LEGIARTI000023491026&cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006074220 http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle...
- claudius 14y ago§ 1353 of the BGB (German Civil Code) can be found at http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__1353.html http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__1353.html (literally ‘laws on the internet’).
- mhd 14y agoSo close, with minimal effort they could map that to '/bgb/1353'. It seems that dejure.org actually works that way -> http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353 http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353 seems to map to http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353.html http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/1353.html, but they graciously ignore any kind of file extension...
- claudius 14y agoWell they already managed to get an overview/full-text at /bgb/, so I am quite happy for now…
- Jhsto 14y agoLegal portals are also many times vulnerable to a form of directory traversal, where you descend the URL scheme by cropping out the last slash. ie. /documents/17683/ would become /documents/. Doing the same thing for parameters can do wonders. So far I've found login portals to a few banks, teleoperators and to the parliament and military systems of my country. In addition, I've hit several FTP directories of organizations such as my state's public welfare system, which included software and documents. I sometimes report these incodents as I find them, anonymously and without contact information, since nobody never responds to these reports. tldr; Long urls can also be dangerous.
- insteadof 14y agoIt was up until last week, but http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-pre✓™ http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-pre✓™ was the canonical version. Now it redirects to the version you don't need to know the ALT keyboard jockeying with.
- ozh 14y agoHow about http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-pre%E2%9C%93%E2%84%A2 http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-pre%E2%9C%93%E2%84%A2 ? It's "TSA-Pre✓™" and you have to type in the checkmark and the trademark symbols, otherwise it 404s Edit: ho, they fixed that and it's redirected. Too bad, that was funny :)
- ramses0 14y ago"I can't imagine the skill required to do this without the experience to know it's a bad idea" (can't find the source for this quote, but you should get the sentiment). ...ahhh... found it: """"How do you attain the skills required to do this while not also learning not to?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4711355 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4711355 """
- blcknight 14y agoThe way you end up with URL's like http://www.tsa.gov/TSA-Pre✓™ http://www.tsa.gov/TSA-Pre✓™ is a CMS system that replaces spaces with dashes in the title to make the URL. No skill required.
- whalesalad 14y agoGlad to see they finally fixed that with a redirect to a sane url.
- franze 14y agoi have seen worse. i.e. sites that show on page with the url http://www.example.com http://www.example.com and another page with the URL http://www.example.com http://www.example.com and even after another click the URL http://www.example.com http://www.example.com with completely new content and sites, that use a logic like this http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/this-should-be-the-seo-part-of-the-url http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/this-should-b... where http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/this-is-should-be-the-seo-part-of-the-url http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/this-is-shoul... and http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/tHIS-is-the-sEo-part-of-the-URL http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd/tHIS-is-the-s... show the same page, oh and of course http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd http://www.example.com/357893857435/sfjsfsfsfd also shows the same page. oh, and cases where http://www.example.com/click1/click2/click3/item-id/123 http://www.example.com/click1/click2/click3/item-id/123 show the same page as http://www.example.com/click1/item-id/123 http://www.example.com/click1/item-id/123 which show the same page as http://www.example.com/click1/click2/click3/click4/item-id/123 http://www.example.com/click1/click2/click3/click4/item-id/1... all of the examples above are far worse than bvb.de
- tsahyt 14y agoQuite frankly, I despise the use of "SEO URLs" altogether. It's basically a waste of bytes.
- davedx 14y agoNot if you view SEO as genuinely helping search engines to find content in a way that improves the discoverability of web pages. If it's purely to boost rankings artificially, then yes, I agree.
- nkozyra 14y agoSometimes, sometimes not. You can often compress a lot of ¶meter=value into a simple /value/ rewrite. This - by most accounts - makes it more SEO friendly. Granted, putting full sentences that match an article title is never necessary, but there are a lot of SEO tricks that can make a url not only "nicer" looking but also shorter.
- glyphobet 14y agoIt's Latin-1 encoded and then URL-encoded: >>> import urllib >>> print urllib.unquote('%1B%E7%F4%9D').decode('latin-1') çô
- mustermann 14y agoAdd the one below to the collection: http://www.wg-gesucht.de/1-zimmer-wohnungen-in-Berlin.8.1.0.0.html?filter=cbf7a0c31b5135fe440b64aef5ecf43a9530846d0bc2cf61a9 http://www.wg-gesucht.de/1-zimmer-wohnungen-in-Berlin.8.1.0....
- waffle_ss 14y agoI think THOMAS (http://thomas.loc.gov/ http://thomas.loc.gov/), the search engine provided by the US Library of Congress for searching federal legislation, has the worst URLs I've seen. Here's a random one: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:1:./temp/~bdGqLa:@@@T|/home/LegislativeData.php| And here's a link I got to the Patriot Act (HR 3162): http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:44:./temp/~c107DgA33R::
- twistedpair 14y agoMaking sense of that in linear time would be a great interview question.
- networked 14y agoThe ./temp/~c107DgA33R bit looks like a reference to a cached internal state of the system, so you can probably make about as much sense of it as you can of https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=H1QJE8EOaO2OkA28owXZ4H https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=H1QJE8EOaO2OkA28owXZ4H.
- h-go 14y agoWhy? Surely you'd have to go out of your way to make it that unnecessarily complicated.
- jnazario 14y agoi have often thought that the THOMAS system was an overt attempt to obfuscating government activities. it's such a pain to use.
- acdha 14y agoWhile it's been reskinned, THOMAS dates back to 1995 and the core reflects a much earlier era of web development. It's slowly being replaced with congress.gov which has far more palatable URLs: http://beta.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162 http://beta.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162
- smackfu 14y agoNote that these are not even canonical URLs. Both of them now fail with a "Search Timed Out" error. US Trademark Office has the same issue, there is no way to link to a particular trademark, because the only access is via the search engine and queries time out, e.g.: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:xtjwoh.2.1 http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:xt...
- romaniv 14y agoWeird characters aside, having URLs of the form example.com?stuff has many advantages. For one, you don't need any weird magic to get relative URLs working properly.
- verandaguy 14y agoSANITIZE ALL THE SERVER CONTENTS!
- greggman 14y agoWhat makes this bad? Or rather what makes this objectively bad? I feel like URL schemes espoused by people who judge them are basically bs. Success of the website IMO seems like the only objective measure and by that measure pretty much any URL scheme is fine given the schemes used on some of the most popular sites use schemes that people like jakub_g complain about I can see where maybe an API URL might have objective better and worse schemes but a content URL? Show me the research results, not just fashion opinions
- greggman 14y agoIt's a legit point and a legit question. Instead of voting it down answer the question with some objective facts
- emidln 14y agoA former coworker of mine created django-unfriendly[1], which seems like it's probably worse. On the other hand, django-unfriendly is meant to obfuscate on purpose. [1] - https://github.com/tomatohater/django-unfriendly https://github.com/tomatohater/django-unfriendly
- cmsj 14y agoI counter with http://www.ctshirts.co.uk http://www.ctshirts.co.uk just go there and even the front page transmutes itself into a horrifying URL of doom. Depending on which subsection of the site you're in, you sometimes also get |||||||| on the end of the URL. I actually know someone who works in the e-commerce dept of the company and I think we should all berate him for how terrible a person he is ;)
- cmsj 14y agoI just noticed that %7C is the URL encoded form of..... | so it's always just full of pipes!
- bobbo3 14y agoHere's a NOT SAFE FOR WORK url. http://www.adultwork.com/ViewProfile.asp?UserID=1945109&Keywords=&KeySearch=1&TargetURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eadultwork%2Ecom%2FSearch%2Easp%3FRefreshVar%3D02%252F05%252F2013%2B17%253A11%253A24%26cboCountryID%3D158%26cboCountyID%3D146%26cboAPID%3D0%26rdoRatings%3D0%26cboLastUpdated%3D01%252F01%252F2003%26intAgeFrom%3D25%26intAgeTo%3D33%26DF%3D1%26cboLastLoginSince%3DX%26strSelPostCode%3D%26HotListSearch%3D0%26rdoKeySearch%3D1%26strPostCodeArea%3D%26SearchTab%3DProfile%26cboRegionID%3D11%26question_69%3D%26question_70%3D%26question_2%3D%26question_3%3D%26question_57%3D%26question_27%3D%26question_42%3D%26strKeywords%3D%26intHalfHourRateFrom%3D%26intHalfHourRateTo%3D%26dteAvailableAnotherDay%3D%26hdteToday%3D02%252F05%252F2013%26cbxSelIsEscort%3DON%26strTown%3D%26dteMeetDate%3D%26intMiles%3D%26intMilesUSA%3D%26rdoOrderBy%3D7%26intMeetDuration%3D%26cbxGenderID%3D2%26cboSCID%3D0%26cbxPreferenceID%3D55%26intHourlyRateFrom%3D%26intHourlyRateTo%3D%26intHotListID%3D0%26PageNo%3D1%26SS%3D0%26strSelUsername%3D%26dteMeetTime%3DX%26intMeetPrice%3D%26cboBookingCurrencyID%3D28%26intOvernightRateFrom%3D%26intOvernightRateTo%3D%26strSelZipCode%3D%26CommandID%3D1&NavUserIDs=1768061x1983764x1816348x1873822x1896482x1964251x548903x1052569x1188136x1431008x1780228x1788349x1801647x1475155x1635012x1964725x1995120x1985169x1657721x1678563x1620768x591995x1551539x1579011x1996472x1694586x1198128x1916266x1945109x883257x1097958x273262x1891436x1578047x1797390x1415157x1825574x1935666x1119043x929033x1935510x1957223x1468772x1873269x1494092x1120357x1282956x1284275x1107421x639826
- ante_annum 14y agohttp is a perfectly normal url scheme ducks