I’ve banned query strings

You’re misreading a couple of things. There’s no violation of common convention where you’re pointing.

Where dealing with static file servers:

For URLs that are supposed to include a trailing slash and the server will find that directory and serve its index.html: it’s customary, though not ubiquitous, to redirect from no-slash to slash. (Some, including popular commercial services, serve the index.html file instead of redirecting to add the slash. This is extremely wrong because it changes the meaning of relative URLs.)

But the other way round is not common.

My URLs don’t include a file extension, and I think that’s influencing your perception into thinking no-query-strings is logically a directory name. But it’s not, it’s logically a file name, just with the .html removed as unnecessary.

Take https://susam.net/no-query-strings.html as an example; Susam is more clearly just serving from a file system than I am, and leaves the “.html” file extension in the URL. Do you expect https://susam.net/no-query-strings.html/ to work? I hope not. It’s a 404, just as I’d expect, because there is no directory with that name.

> not-a-404 page

No, that’s a 404, just a plain old boring 404, same as any other. In fact, it’s the same 404 page I’ve been using since 2019, just with dark mode support added.

> extra slashes

Ah, now for that I had to go out of my way, because Caddy misbehaves out of the box: https://chrismorgan.info/Caddyfile#:~:text=%40has%5Fmultiple...

> digression: I love trying "domain.com//" on various sites.

Closely related is adding the trailing dot of a fully-qualified domain name: https://example.com./. I didn’t remember to try this on my new site, but it turns out Caddy won’t talk at https://chrismorgan.info./, so that’s probably good.

This corrupts a URL like:

  https://example.com/?p=20&utm_source=spam

to:

  https://example.com/

when in fact we want the following:

  https://example.com/?p=20

A possible improvement can be:

  javascript:(()=>{const u=new URL(location.href);[...u.searchParams.keys()].forEach(k=>{if(k.startsWith('utm_')){u.searchParams.delete(k)}});navigator.clipboard.writeText(u.href)})();

How much do platforms mangle people’s links? Figured I’d check the ones you mention. (I was actually mildly surprised to be able to find examples in all of them without needing to log in once. I thought LinkedIn and ChatGPT wouldn’t.)

Facebook: no.

Pinterest: ?utm_source=Pinterest&utm_medium=organic.

ChatGPT: ?utm_source=chatgpt.com. (Aside: wow it’s confidently and atrociously wrong if you ask it about me. Ask it just vaguely enough, and it hallucinates someone clearly inspired by me, but who has done a whole lot of stuff that I haven’t. Ask it more precisely about me, and it gets all kinds of details wrong still. I feel further vindicated in hating this stuff. You made me use ChatGPT for the very first time.)

LinkedIn: no.

Twitter: no.

Reddit: no.

YouTube: no.

> if you get enough traffic that you can pick which sources you want to allow, that's a good problem to have.

Nah, I just don’t care about them. It’s my place, I’m doing things on my own terms. Should I discover it to be causing me problems, I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

But then it’s barely a protest.

I also contemplated making it serve the content of the original page, but with every . and ! turned to ? (or maybe ! changed to ‽). But I decided that was too hard at present. I might revisit it later, there’s a stage in my plans where that will be easier to implement.