Rob Lanphier wrote:
I guess I'm not quite so confident this problem won't rear it's head again, but since it's a theoretical problem at this point, and we have enough actual problems to deal with, I'm happy to drop it for now.
This thread reminded me of the old Webalizer hack of including "&dontcountme=s" in URLs to avoid things like JavaScript loads inflating the stats it collected. (Or at least I think that's the issue the URL parameter was trying to solve.)
The URL trick crept into all sorts of places, including site-wide JavaScript pages, article text, and even core code.[1]
I think setting a standard is a good idea in general, though I worry about making it prefix-based (like all URLs starting with "http://foo.wikiproject.org/wiki/"). I can see potential problems with counting hits to the secure server and I can see potential problems if the URL structure changes in the future (possibly to something more sensible like "http://foo.wikiproject.org/view/"). These problems might be non-existent or unavoidable, I'm not completely sure.
MZMcBride
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/35103