Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 July 28

= July 28 =

Is there any good old school chat websites?
Where you don't have to download anything to chat on it? Venustar84 (talk) 03:02, 28 July 2014 (UTC)


 * "Good" is a matter of preference. There are a number of chat sites though.  Just do a search with your favorite search engine for chat site and you should be able to find many.  One of the top results for me was Omegle.  Dismas |(talk) 03:05, 28 July 2014 (UTC)


 * There are a number of online IRC clients available. One that I found after a minute of googling was Kiwi IRC, though there are many more out there that might work better for you. Gbear605 (talk) 21:19, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

What happens in these comic strip URLs? (Firefox only)
This relates to this question and this question that I asked earlier. I can go to the June 20 comic strip, for example; watch what happens to the URL at the top of the screen. But if I substitute "04/14" after 2014 without changing any of the other information after "06/20", I still arrive at my intended destination. If I go to April 14 the normal way, watch what happens to the URL.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:13, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, it's not happening to me at home. I normally look at these strips where the Internet is faster, and most days that is on a Firefox computer.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:17, 28 July 2014 (UTC)


 * The # and following text is a fragment identifier. It was historically the only part of the URL that Javascript was allowed to modify (there's now a standard "history API" that can modify the rest, but many web sites still target older browsers). I don't know why the Javascript on that particular page is appending random-looking crud to the URL. -- BenRG (talk) 00:40, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I was on an Internet Explorer computer at a library and it happened there too. I was going to the gocomics.com web site and clicking on the links to the comic strips, and it did happen.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  15:15, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It happens to me too. I think it's deliberate. I just don't know why. The only purpose it would serve would be as a quasi-cookie that would be saved when you bookmarked the page or shared the link with someone. But even if I copy and paste the same URL with the fragment, they just replace it with a different one, so it looks as though they're ignoring it. -- BenRG (talk) 20:39, 30 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Adding #RandomGarbage to a URL makes it unique such that local caching won't use a local copy of the page. It will force a reload of the page every time you visit it. Which, in turn, forces a reload of all the ads on the page. In the end, it is there to force advertising to refresh every time you hit the page. 209.149.115.166 (talk) 19:17, 31 July 2014 (UTC)