Does this also work in mail readers?
I tested this in Thunderbird by subscribing to the blog's feed.
It didn't show the characters when hovering although Firefox does.
Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#32I actually like this. Assuming you agree there are non-creepy reasons to track clicks (not a given on HN) then this lets you keep your urls nice and clean when people just want to copy and paste them. I imagine it might break in some scenarios (the url ends up with junk in it from bad unicode conversion) but it's up to you to be permissive in the urls you accept.
There are non-creepy reasons for click-tracking--e.g., you're a nonprofit supporting a cause, trying to identify preferences of your supporters. But caution: it might become creepy when you /appear/ to be hiding the tracking from your supporters. Why not give them readable URLs and be totally upfront about what you're doing?
I don't think creepy stuff is less creepy if you're not doing it for profit.
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#33Post as many as character you want and it will work. Here:
http://kaspars.net/blog/web-development/invisible-click-trac...
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#34So who would pay for a tool to make creating/handling/analyzing these links as easy as using UTM parameters?
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#35Just to point out that hovering over the link shows URL-encoded codepoints, i.e. %u200B (in Firefox, for me, at least). I do think it's a better solution than the existing approach with GET parameters which does look clumsy.
Safari appears to do the same. Version 8.0.3 (10600.3.18)
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#36So who would pay for a tool to make creating/handling/analyzing these links as easy as using UTM parameters?
It's not that big of a deal to have these fields visible in the first place. The post is a nice trick, but I doubt it has a market for a startup.
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 5 5 5 5 if you limit to a 5 character word!
You have 5 choices for each character. If you have limit to 5 character words you can assume that all 5 char, 4 char, 3, 2, 1 and 0 char words are included too. I get: 5^0+5^1+5^2+5^3+5^4+5^5 = 3,906 But I may have totally missed something. Edit: looking a little closer I see some italics in your 55555 so I guess you have 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5
Ah, I missed the 4-1 length ones. And yes those were *s
Re: Invisible Click Tracking Using “Empty” UTF-8 Characters
#38I actually like this. Assuming you agree there are non-creepy reasons to track clicks (not a given on HN) then this lets you keep your urls nice and clean when people just want to copy and paste them. I imagine it might break in some scenarios (the url ends up with junk in it from bad unicode conversion) but it's up to you to be permissive in the urls you accept.
I usually remove trailing spaces from URLs, and a lot of auto-linkifying processes (if they're Unicode-aware) will likely strip them too, so I predict this method won't be robust enough to survive a lot of the handling that URLs are often subject to. If I'm filling out some form fields with URLs, I strip trailing (and leading) spaces too.
These are zero width characters. There's no reason why they have to be at the end of the URL.