Example (spam post containing an amazon affiliate link, post hopefully deleted by now but I assume mods/admins can see it): https://lemmy.world/post/15846936

Also there are tons of links people post legitimately but have tracking parameters, gclid=this, fbclid=that, etc. Those can be cleaned up too.

By editing out these parameters automatically when the link is posted, people’s privacy can be protected and the incentive to post affiliate spam can be decreased.

It could be a server config parameter and/or put into the posting UI: “your post contains [link] with flagged parameters, choose between a) post cleaned up version (shown), or b) post link without changes (may go into moderation queue depending on community settings).”

  • @solrizeOP
    3•7 months ago

    I maintain a list and it’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t try to be leakproof. It has maybe a dozen actions (code fragments) a table of site names mapping names to actions.

    • ScrubblesEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      Then I’d say that’d be a great 3rd party plugin for Lemmy (which they just enabled support for btw). I don’t think that should be a core lemmy feature, to be dependent on a list of query parameters that need to be kept up to date, but it would be a perfect use case for a plugin, which could call out to a database/script/file of known trackers and their domains, and throw up a warning like you’re saying.

      Not trying to demoralize you, actually the exact opposite, this would be a great project for you if you already have a list! If you built a plugin that could do that for Lemmy I would be one of the first instances to install it!

      • @solrizeOP
        2•7 months ago

        Tbh 5 or so parameters take care of 80% of cases. I’m not conversant enough with lemmy implementation to know the difference between core and non core features but it has to be on the server side because there are too many clients.