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Comment by buddydvd | Hacker News Reader

OP's blog post says Quora is not doing that. It says Quora's redirecting to gigaom.com from http://www.quora.com/_/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom.com%... instead of http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-c....

The technique I described allows Quora to customize the referrer associated with an outbound link.

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Ah yes, I misread your post. The trouble with that approach is that you have to enumerate the dangerous params, and if the actual page URL needs a private parameter to work, you can't get rid of it.

Right, but you can always pass the canonical url to the redirector. That lets you avoid maintaining a whitelist/blacklist of query params. This should be trivial for Quora as most of their pages already contain the meta tag specifying the canonical url:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-everyday-apps-that-use-cloud-computing" />

They just need to update their outbound link interceptor to take that version instead of the actual url.

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