Anatomy of a Gab Post URL

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 24 May 2017 22:52:54 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I've taken to reporting each time that number of posts on Gab crosses a multiple of a million. It recently passed eight million posts. Some have asked how I determined that. This post is the answer.

https://gab.ai/billstclair/posts/8016964 is my post reporting on eight million posts. Here are it's components:

NameTextDescription
Protocolhttps://Tells your browser to use the HTTPS protocol, SSL-encrypted Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
Hostgab.ai/The internet host containing the web page.
Gab UserbillstclairThe ID of the user who made the post. Stop here to show that user's profile page. There are a bunch of special tokens that can go here that may NOT be a userid, e.g. "home", "tv", "popular", "lists", "chats", "settings".
Content Type/posts/Says that the rest of the URL will identify one of the user's posts.
Post Number8016964The number of the post. This is a global counter of all posts ever made. This is what I used to determine that there were over 8 million posts.

Note that you need to know both the user ID AND the post number to address a post, so there's no way to step through the posts by simply incrementing the post number. This was a smart, security-conscious decision on @e's part.

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