Facebook's ?fbcld= parameter breaks kb.roonlabs.com links

I frequently share links to kb.roonlabs.com articles (especially http://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality) to answer questions about Roon in audio groups on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook adds an fbcld HTTP GET parameter to these shared links, so when I share a link like this:

http://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality

When someone clicks on it, they are taken here instead:

http://kb.roonlabs.com/RAAT?fbclid=IwAR10xJ6yd45kPu-eW3NdVzREvA0HKX_FDvwi6O8TChkBMs5VmVBudHZAmF0

As a result, instead of seeing this:

They see this:

I’ve brought this attention to the folks at Facebook, and they said, “Web sites that break when arbitrary query args are added to them are incredibly rare (we did a lot of studies on this before we implemented click ids).”

Implementing an opt-out for these parameters on Facebook’s side is non-trivial, so the best solution is for the maintainers of kb.roonlabs.com to ignore unsupported query parameters (fbcid, in particular) instead of incorrectly assuming that they are part of a search. It may be as simple as ignoring searches that match the pattern [:word:]=[:text:].

I hope you will implement a fix because it’s annoying to have to write stuff like this whenever I want to help someone past a Roon issue:

Thanks.

– David
[Personal info removed]

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The software used to drive the forum here is Discourse.

I found one topic about that in their forum but I don’t know if this is of any help here:

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Is Discourse also used for Roon’s knowledge base (kb.roonlabs.com)?

You’re right, the KB is probably not using Discourse.

Hi @David_Snyder,

I (finally!) fixed the server software that powers our knowledge base so that links like this:

http://kb.roonlabs.com/RAAT?fbclid=IwAR10xJ6yd45kPu-eW3NdVzREvA0HKX_FDvwi6O8TChkBMs5VmVBudHZAmF0

Should work. Let me know if you find any other problems like this.

Thanks!

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Wonderful. Thanks, @ben! Happy New Year. :slight_smile:

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Thank goodness Dave Snyder followed up on this… now Roon’s KB is useful. :wink: Applause for David Snyder!

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