Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:25:22 +0000 https://bugs.horde.org/ticket/10751 Automatically strip utm_* (urchin/google analytics) parameters from bookmarked URLs Same as http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/06/war_on_urchin/ War on Urchin! If you've ever clicked an article in your RSS reader or Twitter stream, you may have noticed an unsightly query string clinging to the end of your URL like shit to a sneaker: http://www.example.com/chromebook-series-5-review/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weblogsinc%2Fengadget+%28Engadget%29 These parameters are used for tracking by a Google product called Urchin. There are five of them (term, campaign, media, source and content) and they are just another one of the malicious effects of URL shortening. When everyone is passing around shortened links, it's easier to add this kind of cruft to the fully-expanded URLs without anyone caring much. Today I finally started stripping utm_* query parameters from all URLs arriving in Pinboard. They create needless URL bloat, erode user privacy, make it more difficult to identify duplicate content, and benefit ad publishers at the expense of everyone else. Out they go! It will take me a little while to make this change retroactive, so some users may see what appear to be duplicate bookmarks show up in their account. Please rest assured that these will disappear as I work my way backwards through the database. Soon: death to URL shorteners! Sat, 12 Nov 2011 23:37:15 +0000 https://bugs.horde.org/ticket/10751#t68744 Changes have been made in Git (master): commit f503d3d05ea995a47361b7213fe042797016e6c0 Author: Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck@horde.org> Date: Fri Dec 21 00:59:54 2012 -0500 Strip utm_ parameters from incoming bookmarks, and provide a script to strip them from already-saved bookmarks (Request #10751) trean/bin/trean-backfill-remove-utm-params | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ trean/docs/CHANGES | 2 ++ trean/lib/Url.php | 22 ++++++++++++++++++++++ trean/package.xml | 2 ++ trean/templates/add.html.php | 2 +- 5 files changed, 55 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/commit/f503d3d05ea995a47361b7213fe042797016e6c0 Fri, 21 Dec 2012 06:00:14 +0000 https://bugs.horde.org/ticket/10751#t75837