I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

A quiet blog post about web links somehow turned into full-on comment section theater. Writer Susam Pal says he’s joining Chris Morgan’s anti-query-string crusade — basically, he doesn’t want extra junk tacked onto website addresses unless it’s truly needed. The spark was his small project, Wander Console, a simple tool for hopping between hand-picked personal websites, which ran into trouble when one site used a link suffix to decide what content to show. To Pal, that was a sign something had gone wrong with how the modern web handles links.

But the community? Oh, they had thoughts. One camp cheered the old-school spirit, saying Wander feels like the return of the beloved “webring” era — a more human, less algorithm-driven internet where trusted people share cool stuff instead of giant platforms force-feeding everyone the same sludge. Another camp rolled its eyes hard at what they saw as a dramatic overreaction: one odd website does something weird, and now all query strings are the villain? That take got especially spicy.

Then came the nitpicking, and naturally, it was glorious. One commenter joked that the site’s error handling was so strict it was basically a prank, while another questioned why users should get punished for pasting a messy link they may not even understand. And yes, someone instantly tested the rule with a cheeky link just to see what kind of error page they’d get. Classic internet behavior: half philosophy debate, half chaos goblin energy.