All those “s=” strings and other things they throw in the URL mess up the record of where you’ve visited. I often have only GQ highlighted, because that’s what I visit first.
What is that ‘s=’ thing about anyway?
Note how Mangetout didn’t copy his task bar into that picture. What else were you looking at, dear sir? C’mon, we’re all friends here.
Well, we had a very nasty example of someone trying to “run the table” this morning, in several forums. This spammer did many, many multiple posts that were a porn-link.
The spammer is blasted out of the water, and the posts all deleted, but the name still appears on lots and lots of threads as “most recent poster.” Sigh.
A session id, or something that functions like one implemented by vbulletin. If you log out, you will notice that it gets filled in with what appears to be a GUID (globally unique identifier) string of some sort and follows you around. You can get the same effect if you log back in and refuse cookies (it will also keep trying to set the cookies).
Given inability to get user information from the browser via a cookie, they have to follow you around with an id in the URL’s which lets them look up the info on the server side, presumably with a timeout after which they pitch it. It seems that they don’t suppress the argument for this id when cookies are received, they just generate it empty. That may be by accident or design, and it may be an artifact of either vbulletin or php in general. I don’t work with php (I work with J2EE), so I don’t know details of how it handles session identifiers.
Dealing with session information for users who refuse even session cookies is a big pain in the butt. J2EE servers which handle it may resort to URL rewriting, intercepting the output from all generated page output, parsing it to find local URL’s, and inserting session id arguments on the fly.
CoNsPiRaCy ThEoRiSt eh? - my task bar is set to auto hide.