Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links

Re:Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links by lolc on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @08:52AM (#18282906)

Facebook can't set arbitrary request headers easily. That would require messing with how the user-agent retrieves things. Cookies are the chosen way servers can set client request headers. So the tracking-information is passed by a cookie. Now since browsers are starting to be selective about cookies, Facebook becomes inventive.

Adding a request parameter absolutely will break things. And they knew this. The only question was what's worse: Not being able to track some people or breaking some of their links. Facebook decided the former is more important to them and their customers.

And even if nothing else brakes, uglifying the URL people are posting is in itself an anti-feature.

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Re:Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links by danShumway on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @11:14AM (#18284038)

I'm less worried about uglifying URLs, and more about the 404 stuff that a few other people have posted about now. It never occurred to me that there'd be more than an extremely minimal number of sites that would error out when receiving extra query params.

That's a new one for me, I need to make sure I remember it in the future. From what I'm seeing online, it's not even necessarily considered bad practice, so... I dunno anymore.

But agreed, Facebook should back this out.

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Re:Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links by lolc on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:41PM (#18284963)

Try going to a Pizzeria and say "Pizza Margherita, with extra Zejeako please". Should they just give you a Pizza Margherita because they don't know what Zejeako is? Or should they tell you they can't do it?

> Facebook should back this out.

They won't. They knew what would happen and did it anyway.

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