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