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newhouse / url-tracking-stripper

An open-source Chrome Extension that will remove the tracking parameters from URLs to keep them short and cleaner for sharing, bookmarking, etc. It will also skip any known redirects and take you straight to the target URL instead of passing you through an intermediate URL.
MIT License
192 stars 26 forks source link

Open to splitting the URL parsing into a package? #120

Open chmac opened 3 years ago

chmac commented 3 years ago

I've found several plugins that perform this awesome work of making the web just a little less sucky.

It seems like everybody maintains their own set of rules and their own stripping code. I'm looking to bring the same logic to more places, like as an app on the iPhone that I can share to as a target, and then share from, because friends don't share tracking links with friends. Rather than reinvent the wheel I'm hoping to find a way to share code with existing plugins.

Would it be overkill to split the link parsing logic from this plugin into a separate npm package?

wumpus commented 3 years ago

This is an awesome idea, because it's not just people who benefit from these rules -- a web crawler needs to know them, too.

It would be even better if the rules were expressed in a language-independent way, similar to how adblock currently works.

wumpus commented 3 years ago

p.s. note that this is similar to the issue I opened 3 years ago, https://github.com/newhouse/url-tracking-stripper/issues/49

chmac commented 3 years ago

@wumpus That's a great point. If the rules were in a code agnostic format (I personally like your suggestion of using YAML) then we could interop on the rules without being tied together on implementations. 👍

Do you think it makes sense to close this issue and fold it into #49? Seems like that has stalled a little since 2018?

wumpus commented 3 years ago

Well, someone needs to actually do this. None one stepped up for #49, who knows if someone will step up for this one? That's more important than the organization of the issues!

newhouse commented 3 years ago

Hi @chmac @wumpus and thanks for writing in. I've been so busy with my professional stuff that I've not had time to think much about this project. I don't want to abandon it, though, and in general have become even more involved with open source stuff recently, too...so I like the idea.

Perhaps we could hop on some sort of Zoom / Hangouts / whatever and discuss this a bit? Not sure how we get that going without putting our e-mail addresses out in public? You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and my gmail is my github username with c. in front.

I also feel like there's got to be some sort of project that's already doing some of this that we could piggy-back or build off of?

wumpus commented 3 years ago

I don't think there is another project already doing this. But while I have wanted this for about 10 years now, I haven't looked recently to see if someone is already doing it. The adblocking community has always had a computer-language-independent approach to block lists. @newhouse I will send you an email, and I hope @chmac and anyone else who is interested will also chime in.

chmac commented 2 years ago

I had this project on my "I really want to do this" list for a while, but by now I have to accept that it's unlikely I'll get any time to put into it in the foreseeable future. I'd love to see such a mission come to fruition, but like so many things, I guess it'll wait for somebody to take on the mission.