couldn't find jeff atwoods comment on twitter but he did have this to say on Stack Overflow back in 2009 [ answered Jan 13 '09 at 10:15 ][ https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/79880 ]:

It's even worse: those strfriend URLs in the form of

http://strfriend.com/vis?re=(Zip%3A\s*\d\d\d\d\d)\s*(State%3...

are really painful.You'll have to encode almost everything in it. See my edit.* Works now, but not worth it IMO.

str friend? more like str ENEMY.