Stop extraneous parameters appearing in URLs

[RichardTaylor]

I raised this ticket mainly in relation to ?cookie_passthrough=1 appearing in lots of links on the site, and links to the site from search engines and elsewhere

Reasons:

• It looks untidy and cluttered. It not crisp and clean.
• If we have to ask Google remove a URL we have been submitting the URL with and without ?cookie_passthrough=1
• We have nice URLs generally, and our URLs are getting cited in places including the?cookie_passthrough=1 at the end
• There might be search optimisation benefits from getting rid of it.

Related:

• Appearance of ?utf8=✓ or the URLEncoded version ?utf8=%e2%9c%93 in URLs (I recall this has been discussed before, with a decision to keep it).

Variants:

• ?cookie\_passthrough=1
• ?cookie (with nothing following)

[garethrees]

Appearance of ?utf8

Rails – the web framework – adds this, so is effectively unchangeable (can't recall the details off hand, but not worth exploring)