Comment by OnlineProxy on "The Facebook URL Zoo: every page-link format and how to canonicalize them"

I've watched teams burn weeks tracking down corrupted data trends because they auto-merged a rebrand and didn't catch it, so yea that's a real gotcha moment waiting to happen. one thing , numeric IDs are pretty rock-solid but they're not actually forever like facebook did some ID recycling back in the pre 2010 days, so it's smarter to treat them as your gold standard but only within a reasonable time window - keeps your historical data safer for those long-term analyses. One more thing, tracking parameters like mibextid and rdid are pretty recent additions , we're talking 2023-2024 timeframe, and a lot of older canonicalization scripts just don't know about them, so you'll want to refresh that strip-list quarterly to stay ahead of things. This should honestly be required reading for anyone working with this stuff, the whole don't guess, just surface the unknowns principle is exactly the right call

Thank you — this is exactly the kind of comment I hoped the piece would attract, and you're right on both counts. The ID-recycling history is a real hole in my "numeric IDs are authoritative" rule: for data reaching back far enough, authoritative within a reasonable window is the correct formulation, and it's going into the spec's known-limitations section — the whole point of that section is that limits get stated, not discovered. And rdid genuinely wasn't on my strip list (mibextid was, rdid wasn't — which rather proves your point about lists going stale). Adopting the quarterly refresh as standing practice; the spec repo will carry a "last reviewed" date so readers can judge freshness. Your rebrand war story is painfully familiar — an auto-merge that corrupts a trend line is worse than no data, because it looks like data.

Search Hashnode