cleaning the URL

m.lana

hi, when importing a webpage, its URL is taken as is, what means that often it ends with a long and unwanted a referrer string:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/elon-musk-says-all-advanced-ai-development-should-be-regulated-including-at-tesla/?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhldmVyZ2UuY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAI9WI4jz_RIiiY1Exwagfs6GvLX07lpqLjdOKfchw5Xu20WVWtq4mSlhWISov773O3shUnLi-VKQ6BLVtQzTX00ps3VsuH8N6ntCR77gdbXL7uE8U_Ev4dRZz-E0BDFZKkX9UhhgiO1UzN3Hd06LjJv_sCjbEb1Zqkntrn013oFf&guccounter=

while the relevant working part is much shorter:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/elon-musk-says-all-advanced-ai-development-should-be-regulated-including-at-tesla/

would it be possible for Zotero to truncate these bloated URLs just before the "?" ?
best
maurizio

adamsmith

Unfortunately not: The ? delimits query parameters that can absolutely be used to distinguish different URLs. (see e.g. https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=cleaning vs. https://forums.zotero.org/search/?Search=test ) and I don't think there's any way Zotero can know when they're just used for tracking (as is the case for your example) or have a real function.

dstillman

@m.lana: Yeah, the best thing I could suggest here would be a browser extension that you could click to quickly reload with the current query string removed. I'm sure there are many such tools. But you'd want to have a somewhat intuitive sense of when the query string was actually irrelevant (or be willing to click Back if it turned out it wasn't).

"query string" and "query parameters" would be the relevant technical terms here when searching.