Everyday Erinyes #220

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I’m going to try to make this short today, since a lot is going on. Everyone who gets my weekly email is aware that I do my utmost to protect everyone’s privacy by using the “BCC” feature, so that no one who receives it can see anyone else’s email address except mine (just don’t “reply all,” please).

But, although I do try to clean up URLs before posting, I haven’t been quite as conscientious about that. Well, I will be from now on.

Here’s an example – please do not click on it or copy it in full, and I’ll explain why. It’s not even as cluttered as many URLs one sees, but it’s more cluttered than it needs to be.

https://www.metopera.org/season/on-demand/juneteenth?utm_source=OperaStreamsNewsletterW15&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2021_MISC& utm_content=version_A

If this were in a newsletter sent to you, and you clicked on the link, that isn’t what you’d see at the page. Instead, you’d see something like this:

Only when you click in the address bar to select it in order to copy it does the other stuff appear, like this (except there isn’t room for it all):

Now let me quote from a user at Democratic Underground:

 What’s all of the rest of that crap? It’s a lot of tracking info, info that lets God-knows-who discover all kinds of stuff, including things like who decided to share this link, and where that person originally found out about the linked article (from Facebook, from Twitter, from a particular friend, etc). While most of this info is in pretty cryptic, some of it is easier to guess at, like that somewhere along the line this link arrived via a newsletter. 

Bingo. I got this link from a newsletter – specifically the “OperaStreamsNewsletter”. I can’t translate the rest, except that it does say I received it through email. I’m confident it identifies the exact newsletter it was in. I don’t see in this one that it identifies me personally, but I don’t see why I should be expected even to identify, for free, that, when you go there, you got the address from a newsletter sent to me. Plus, as I mentioned, this is a short string. I have seen some that are more than three times as long as this string.

None of that tracking info is needed, however, if all you really want to do is share the article and nothing else.

Since I’m a software engineer, fixing this sort of thing comes naturally to me. For others, it might not be so obvious.

A good rule of thumb: Look for the first “?” in the link. Most of the time you can throw away everything starting from that question mark onward. 

TomCat taught me this technique some time ago, I don’t even remember how many years. But we never discussed why, other than for aesthetic reasons, the technique should virtually always be used. Now I know.

To make sure this works, paste your full link, copy just the first part of the link up to (but not including) the question mark, then paste the fragment you just copied into another browser tab or window. If that works, and takes you to the article you wanted to share with everyone, it’s safe to delete the tracking crap before you post. 

Occasionally this technique does not work, which is why it’s important to check it, at least until you are familiar with how sites work that you use frequently. My experience is that 99.9% of the time it doesn’t work, it’s a link to a petition, and the shortened URL only takes you as far as the home page of the sponsoring group. In that case one pretty well has to use the whole thing. I’ve sometimes tried leaving part of the stuff after the “?” but I’ve never gotten one to work, let alone come up with a rule.  But then, unlike my co-member of Democratic Underground, I’m NOT a software engineer.

Incidentally, if I use (as I normally do) the link tool in the comment box (see above) to tie the link to a word or phrase, I will be especially careful to truncate the URL to the minimum needed. Because, although you can’t see it, if it’s there, the site can see all the tracking information – and you won’t know it. So I’ll be particularly careful to make sure that doesn’t happen.

After all that, here’s the actual link (shortened, I promise, and set to open in a new window). It is a little Juneteenth celebration of African American voices in opera. It features more black singers than there are clips, all but one of whom I know of, most of whom I have heard, several of whom I have seen, one in person. I think I would have added in Ryan Speedo Green, but if you want to know about him, you can look here.   (And this also touches on Denyse Graves. It really is a never-ending story.)

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, thank you for allowing me to use your space for something a little different – for Juneteenth – and please help all our readers to be understanding and patient with me too. And at least, everyone can use the technical information.

[P. S.  – Just in case – the Leontyne Price one links to two tracks.  This was her very last performance at the Met.  The first track is 10+ minutes, but the last 3 minutes are nothing but applause.  A very beloved lady.  After the applause, it goes into a duet with African American bass-baritone Simon Estes.]

The Furies and I will be back.