What does "Copy clean link" mean?

For those looking for similar functionality in Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, I've been using ClearURLs[0] for several years in Firefox and Firefox on Android. It works well.

0: https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

LorenDB• 3 years ago

You beat me to it :)

atdt• 3 years ago

Reviews on the Chrome Web Store mention that the extension can break Google OAuth login flow and Amazon checkout. Did you encounter that at all?

joe51502• 3 years ago

For what it's worth I use the FF version and I've never had this problem as far as I can tell.

BeefySwain• 3 years ago

I used to use this and it did indeed break Amazon checkout. Took me forever to figure out!

jonas-w• 3 years ago

Not OP, and YMMV, but i never had problems with google, amazon or any other website. ClearURLs is one of those extensions you install, after you open your browser for the first time and completely forget about it, because it just works (TM). As a matter of fact, I had to make sure that it was even installed, before commenting.

ptaken• 3 years ago

It does break youtrack quite severely and it took me forever to single out this extension. Afaict there's also no way to filter URLs so I had to get rid of it on my work browser :/

lamontcg• 3 years ago

I don't use Google OAuth much but it works for when I need to enter YTTV credentials. It has never broken Amazon checkout for me, smells like FUD.

morjom2• 3 years ago

uBlock Origin works well enough for me with some basic lists. Recommended reading for firefox users:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...

kayson2• 3 years ago

What lists are you using for queryparams?

techwizrd3• 3 years ago

Is this optional? With ClearURLs, I can choose to copy the clear URL or the original URL. Sometimes we want the original URL in case the ruleset makes a mistake, debugging, or something else.

jjordan• 3 years ago

Just be careful with this kind of plugin. Had something similar installed a few years ago that was breaking some Google links and I had no idea why until I realized I had this kind of plugin installed.

imp0cat• 3 years ago

Is there anything similar that would strip URLs from copied images?

When you Copy Image... in Firefox, the URL is also copied to clipboard and then pasted around, see https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/wil262/any_way_to_... )

superkuh• 3 years ago

The most amazing thing about this link is that the cloudflare page it shows me before the actual page actually sends me to the real page instead of just sitting and spinning forever no matter how many captcha or whatever I do.

I suppose Brave went out of there way to tweak the cloudflare options to allow cross browser compatibility. I didn't know this was possible at all. I guess all the other sites on the web just don't care.

harry84• 3 years ago

cloudflare is a real worry, huh? Not talked about much but their power is quite a bit larger than a de-centralised web should tolerate.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

I wish I could open a link from Messages this way. You can copy the link, but doing so triggers a "preview", which loads the link in an inset window.

filipmares• 3 years ago

Why not make this the default calling it "Copy Link" and offer a second option "Copy Link With Potential Tracking!!!"?

netsharc• 3 years ago

Huh, let's not do that. If I chose "Copy link", I'd expect an exact copy of the string, not a modified (cleaned) one. What next, an image editor where "Copy image" gives you an enhanced image where e.g. people in the background and imperfections on people's skin are removed?

codetrotter2• 3 years ago

imperfections on people's skin are removed?

Why stop there? Why not remove the skin altogether :>

LordDragonfang• 3 years ago

What next, an image editor where "Copy image" gives you an enhanced image where [...] imperfections on people's skin are removed

Nope, not "next", TikTok did that already

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026074/tiktok-m...

morjom2• 3 years ago

because "Copy Link" tells the user they are about to copy the entirety of the link.

TechBro86153• 3 years ago

I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari. It's so difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the query parameters. I also wish Apple would give me a way to expand the URL bar to a word-wrapped input that takes up half the screen. I can't stand highlighting text in that tiny little box.

lapcat7• 3 years ago

I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari.

[self-promotion] My extension StopTheMadness does this: https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...

drcongo• 3 years ago

I can recommend this. Does lots of other useful things too.

TechBro86153• 3 years ago

I actually have this installed! But I disabled it for some reason that I can't remember; I think the defaults were too aggressive and I meant to come back and configure it more precisely when I had the time. I still need to do that... thanks for making it!

The other extension I can absolutely recommend is Vinegar, which replaces hostile video players like the one on YouTube (which injects JS to close itself if you attempt to use picture-in-picture) with a native HTML5 video element.

voisin• 3 years ago

Looks great! Is the one purchase price for use across iOS and MacOS? Or two separate purchases?

tonylemesmer• 3 years ago

Does it work in firefox ios? (Hoping webview makes it work but dont really understand extensions on ios)

nvahalik• 3 years ago

Love this extension!

kilroy123• 3 years ago

Nice. I'm a user and I also recommend it.

rahimnathwani• 3 years ago

I'm curious how you get this to work:

"Stops URL shorteners. Checks the links you click in Safari for well-known link shorteners — bit.ly, tinyurl.com, t.co (used by Twitter), etc. — and loads the unshortened destination URL instead of the shortened URL. This occurs without setting any cookies or other site data, so you can't be tracked by your click."

How can you determine the destination without revealing any tracking info to the link shortening service? Unless you make the request from your backend, wouldn't the user's IP address be revealed to the shortening service, allowing it (or data brokers) to join it with other data about them?

andelink• 3 years ago

I’ve been using  Shortcuts to do this for a while now. Here’s my “Share Clean URL” shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b1bcc002fe894f11858721c0b14...

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

Are there any iOS Safari extensions that do this? Hyperweb comes to mind, though I don't know if they offer this specific feature.

DavideNL2• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085280

manwithaplan• 3 years ago

It's so difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the query parameters.

A lot of times, all that's needed is to insert a # character at the right place in the URL, then load that.

minitech• 3 years ago

If you can get to the right place that conveniently, Shift+End Delete works without a page load. But getting their is its own minor inconvenience.

dantle• 3 years ago

I made a Shortcut to strip links. You can add it to the share sheet. It'll give you a new share sheet with the stripped link. Much faster than mashing backspace.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/528c9af856fc46c9a3d164a85e8...

VoxPelli2• 3 years ago

Safari have it built in for many pages, all that publish a rel-canonical will see Safari share that URL instead – as a way to avoid sharing AMP URL:s I believe

Bad that Twitter isn’t publishing such or is publishing it with tracking

TechBro86153• 3 years ago

I'm not sure it's even Twitter's fault. Usually it happens when I click an embedded Tweet from a blog post and then copy the URL from the URL bar. It's the blog that adds the tracking data. (Does anyone know why a blog would even care to do that? Does Twitter offer some kind of analytics dashboard where you can segment views of your tweets based on query parameters?)

11235813215• 3 years ago

This is a good feature. Arc has a slightly better implementation of this. Cmd+shift+C is the copy current tab URL shortcut, and it removes trackers by default and lets you know it's "a clean URL without trackers :)" in the flash notification. I'd like to see Brave similarly make the default copy clean and add a copy with trackers second option.

andai2• 3 years ago

A browser with a waiting list.. now I've seen it all!

ASalazarMX2• 3 years ago

For the lazy, clicking [Try it for yourself] asks for your email to notify you when "your spot is ready and waiting!".

https://arc.net/

Must be a responsibly release, don't want too many powerusers flooding the web at once.

jemmyw• 3 years ago

Not just a waiting list. You cannot use this browser without signing up for an account.

jklinger4107• 3 years ago

Not every query string in a URL is about tracking. This will break some sites.

EDIT: Correction, they are very conservative with which strings are filtered out. See here: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/browser/net/...

dymk2• 3 years ago

Where did you read that it removes the whole query string?

11235813215• 3 years ago

It doesn’t strip every query string. It acts as if it has a list of known tracking params, but I haven’t investigated the exact mechanism.

brewdad• 3 years ago

I'll take a second attempt using Ctrl+C over always copying the tracking garbage for 90% of URLs.

indymike• 3 years ago

I love the idea of reducing extra paramspam on urls... but this is easily defeated with a redirect. I.e. somedomain.com/<uid here>

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

Isn't this more of a convince when sharing a link than removing the tracking from your own sessions? It kinda assumes that you're already at the final destination when copying so no redirect will be of any use. Or I'm just misunderstanding the purpose.

legrande• 3 years ago

Been using CleanLinks[0] on Firefox for a while now. Nice to know I have the same feature in Brave now. Sometimes I manually remove query params from URLs when sharing them. I really need to automate that though!

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-links-w...

ASalazarMX2• 3 years ago

Have you tried CleanURLs? It's a recommended extension, and has 120K users compared to the 154 of Cleanlinks.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

gesman• 3 years ago

Does it follow redirects and removes affiliate links?

rafaelturk• 3 years ago

This is great.. Amazing how simple, yeat I've never thought about this

racl101• 3 years ago

Nice! Very nice!

sphars• 3 years ago

For Android, I've been using URLCheck[0] for opening any link system wide, to clean the URL and check for redirects and open in specific browser. Just have to set it as your default browser

[0] https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker

codetrotter2• 3 years ago

I use this sometimes and I love it. I just wish I could configure the browser to make this the default always when I copy a link.

haburka• 3 years ago

BRB going to change all my tracking query strings to get around this. don’t be mad at me my OKR is getting tracking to work 2% better.

tshaddox2• 3 years ago

You should add an extra query param containing a MAC that is required to be present and correct for the URL to load. Just kill the normal idea of web URLs altogether.

warkdarrior• 3 years ago

I believe the RFCs do not require URLs to have any editable structure to them (beyond host+port+path+query). In particular the path has no particular semantics and the path+query can hold any values that the server accepts. So the server can define a URL to be well formed in any way they want. Editing a URL on the client is a historical accident at best.

timvisee2• 3 years ago

This is the same browser that did the opposite before: injecting their own referral parameter in links.

dormento• 3 years ago

To be fair, seemed to be by mistake and quickly corrected. They also issued an apoogy.

(disclamer: I still use Firefox and recomend you do so as well).

rovr1382• 3 years ago

That's a really intentional mistake to make.

Another Firefox user

nicce• 3 years ago

Sadly, that is a standard procedure for many current businesses. Do things until you get caught, then say it was a mistake and apogolize.

Of course there are real mistakes, but this one was quite difficult to make…

dahdum• 3 years ago

The mistake was getting caught? Eich’s initial response was that was intentional and ethical. Until it went viral and his view evolved. Granted, I’m not too keen to give him or Brave much benefit of doubt.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944

princevegeta89• 3 years ago

If we're buying in that "by mistake" nonsense we're being so incredibly naive. How can someone even programatically inject referral links in your page "by mistake"?

I've seen too many instances like Google Chrome still tracking you in incognito where companies just come back with they were doing it "by mistake" to believe any of them were really saying the truth.

unxdfa2• 3 years ago

Eich doesn't seem like the sort of person who makes mistakes, preferring to do a PR backtrack after misjudging his audience after comparing them to his own dubious standards. Never the sort who thinks they did something wrong but likes you to think they did.

karlzt• 3 years ago

*apology

kerkeslager5• 3 years ago

In what way did it "seem to be by mistake"?

Brendan Eich is literally the guy who normalized letting websites run code on your machine. Even if we generously assume his intentions are good, the kind of thinking that brought us JavaScript is not even capable of grokking what I want from my browser in terms of privacy, security, and respect for my attention. Even if Brave's commitments to these values is genuine and not just marketing, they simply don't know what those values mean. Even if you trust their intentions, you can't trust their execution.

They started, right off the bat, by getting in bed with advertisers. That's their revenue stream. That's not how you fund a browser that serves users, that's how you fund a browser that serves advertisers. Even if their intentions are good, they don't know how to execute them.

"Mistakes" like injecting redirects into links are exactly what I'd expect Brave to do intentionally, not something I'd assume is a mistake.

colordrops8• 3 years ago

How long ago was this? Is it still the case? And why the flood of comments like this in every Brave thread, but never on Chrome threads? Chrome is purely and unapologetically a portal specifically for supporting an ad network, yet I never see the same sort of comments. At least Brave is upfront about what they are doing.

yucky• 3 years ago

Because these are astroturfed responses attacking Brave. You see it on here anytime the browser is mentioned. Meanwhile, it's the best browser available by a mile which explains their attacks.

judge20202• 3 years ago

TLDR: if you typed in binance.us, it autocompleted the 'suggested site' Binance US, which included a referral link that netted Brave (or maybe Eich themselves) some sum of money (not sure how much it was then, but right now it's $100 USDT when your referral deposits $50).

The argument is that Brave should be considered referring users if you get to Binance (or other sites) via the Omnibox.. but it's disingenuous when it was suggested by the query "Binance", since the user already had the intention to visit and likely sign up for Binance. It would've been more acceptable if the omnibox only injected the referral code if you clicked 'Binance' when you tried to search "crypto exchange".

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269289242905042944

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269423583480082432

yjftsjthsd-h4• 3 years ago

I would expect it's because Brave advertises itself as being privacy friendly. If you use Chrome you know what you're getting, if you use a browser that claims to be focused on privacy you expect better.

p1necone• 3 years ago

People love to nitpick, and hypocrisy is always perceived as worse than just doing bad things even when the bad things are much worse than the thing they did that's hypocritical.

Perfect is the enemy of good and all that jazz. It's basically impossible to try to be a good actor/explain a good thing without HNers throwing whataboutisms at you.

Of course maybe Brave is actually a bad actor, but none of the things people are calling them out for are meaningful evidence of that. The thing they did wasn't a tracking mechanism, it was just a sponsorship deal.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

If you claim to be more ethical than the competition and that's why people should use you, you will be held to a higher ethical standard than that competition. Regardless of whether or not this is right, it is how human psychology has always worked, for all time, so it's weird that anyone is surprised or offended by it (and even more weird to build a business model which depends on people not acting this way).

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

And why the flood of comments like this in every Brave thread

For my part in such comments (I think I even managed to catch a snippy reply from Eich once), I believe the Web3 vision is toxic to the possibility of a truly pro-user web, and Brave as a company is up to its eyeballs in the stuff. I've seen a rot of siloing, appropriation, and pervasive monetization consume the web in the past 20 years, and Web3 is basically about "democratizing" that rot instead of stopping it. It's a bit like offering sharecropping as an alternative to serfdom: one can argue all day that it's better (credibly, even!), but it's a far cry from being pro-farmer.

So when Brave stakes out the position of being pro-user and pro-privacy, I don't think it's meant in the ways that matter to me, and that feels like a kind of dishonesty. It's not that I envision the Brave C-suite gleefully rubbing their hands together like mustachioed cartoon villains at the prospect of deceiving people like me, but neither do I feel like they're being fully candid about the aims and implications of their project. In short, one might reasonably accuse me of viewing Brave's initiatives through thorn-colored glasses, but I think I came by it honestly.

nottorp• 3 years ago

That would be because no one has any hope left for Google. There's no point in complaining or using their browser, they simply cannot be trusted.

Now an incumbent, that gives hope and disappointment.

dheera• 3 years ago

without interfering with coarse-grained campaign-level tracking

I often manually scrub campaign-level stuff when sending links to friends just to have nicer, shorter URLs

dexterdog• 3 years ago

Why do it only then? I wrote a greasemonkey script that pulls most of those before I can even click on them and resolves many known redirectors. I would release it, but it really is a mess and really only works for me. I assume somebody has released something similar, but I couldn't find anything a few years back when I wanted it so I cobbled it together.

NayamAmarshe7• 3 years ago

I'm honestly surprised by the disingenuity of comments like these. Hiding facts on purpose, jumping on the hate train and twisting the situation to make a FOSS browser look bad.

I'm reposting my comment from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34919771#34939391

It wasn't 'caught' with anything, as much as those spicy news articles would have you believe. It was a URL suggestion bug. It was supposed to be turned off by default, and suggest content instead of replacing it.

The bug was fixed in a day after release, the PR is on GitHub. Brave is open source, unlike Chrome and Edge. Let's stop treating FOSS like the other spyware.

This also happened when Brave was like 5 months old. The feature since then has been turned off by default and the affiliate thing was shut down a long ago.

planede2• 3 years ago

This is Brave's official response on the affiliate link matter:

https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/

So they did intend to put affiliate links into suggestions, and the bug was that it was accidentally applied to autocomplete in the URL bar based on the first suggestion.

I think the original intention was shady enough. It's good that they changed direction on this, but the damage on their reputation is well justified in my opinion.

BrendanEich3• 3 years ago

Stop using dishonest language: "links" mean hyperlinks in pages, and we never added any affiliate code to those. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088549

throwaway815232• 3 years ago

I use a python script for this and I constantly have to tweak it to understand more urls. It's not just stripping out tracking parameters. There are also redirects to bypass, real urls encoded in the parameters of the tracked url, and all that. There are some formats which I haven't figured out, like many of the ones used in emailed links. I figure that once it converges I'll rewrite it in Javascript as a browser extension, but even after a year or two of usage and tweaking, it still misses a lot and doesn't seem robust.

heyoni2• 3 years ago

Give us the gist!

throwaway815232• 3 years ago

Wow, I'm surprised anyone else wanted this. Ok I might post a pastebin link here sometime. There is some PII in the script that I'd have to edit out first. The script itself is also a mess. It grew without refactoring because I figured on a total rewrite eventually.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

This is nice, but I wish it would also remove the google tracking wrapper on URLs in g-suite.

m463• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't businesses just switch to unique links?

In other words, like switching an amazon link from:

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/<product-id>

to a shortened tracking url like:

    https://amzn.to/<unique-id>

rovr1382• 3 years ago

I feel someone did something like this.

Maybe facebook? Probably facebook...

Edit

It was facebook, https://tidbits.com/2022/07/19/facebook-change-ensures-track...

There's a discussion here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100

ehPReth• 3 years ago

TikTok does this as well; every 'share' is a unique short link that links back to who generated it and is used, in some cases, to suggest people who view said TikTok to both of you as 'people you may know'

bhartzer• 3 years ago

When copying or sharing a link, I usually manually strip out everything after the ? in the URL.

I've been doing this manually for several years now.

Is it possible to create a bookmarklet that does the same thing (i.e., via JavaSript)?

bobbylarrybobby• 3 years ago

I have an app I use to monitor my clipboard and rewrite certain URLs if sees, placing the clean version back in the clipboard (being sure not to end up in an infinite loop).

LukeLambert• 3 years ago

  javascript:prompt('URL',window.location.origin+window.location.pathname)

Edit: But be aware that some sites (like this one) need the parameters in the query string.

rozab• 3 years ago

https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

By way of idle curiosity: the Amazon example on the CleanURLs homepage and in the repo README calls __mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ a tracking parameter. Is it? Or is it a variation of the _utf8=[U+2603 SNOWMAN] technique to force ancient IE to use a reasonable POST encoding[1]?

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/3222013

enw• 3 years ago

Why is capitalization inconsistent?

Some use sentence case, some title case.

smsm422• 3 years ago

Awesome, I was this close to making an extension for myself to do it, it's so tiring to cut out the refspam every time you copy a link.

kragen• 3 years ago

I want this feature so much, every time I try to copy a link from Fecebutt or Google and paste it elsewhere. This may be what gets me to switch to Brave.

jug• 3 years ago

If you get the ClearURLs extension for Chromium or Firefox and follow a link with junk at the end, it will strip it. But I couldn’t get it to clean what goes into the clipboard and indeed this would be the best.

jcul• 3 years ago

And based on a comment above, it sounds like uBlock origin can also do this, which was news to me!

rexf• 3 years ago

I built a Mac menu bar app for cleaning your clipboard https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1528299767 It removes common tracking for the URL in the clipboard

It also works on iPhone via the shared Universal Clipboard

andai2• 3 years ago

The option "Copy clean link" appears even when both links are identical.

It might be funny (perhaps even educational) to rename "Copy link" to "Copy tainted link" when filth is detected!

yjftsjthsd-h4• 3 years ago

It's probably better UX to make the options consistent even when there's no difference

wruza• 3 years ago

Dynamic menus are terrible. Instead of just doing it you have to guess why the item is missing and then select another one.

abujazar• 3 years ago

The article doesn’t mention how the feature actually works and which parts of the URL are removed.

ElijahLynn• 3 years ago

We would be nice is to have this also work with a Ctrl + C from the URL bar.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

I really like extensions like this.

* ClearURLs – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US) | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

* ClearURLs - Chrome Web Store | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearurls/lckanjgm...

varenc• 3 years ago

If this becomes common, sites could make link cleaning impossible. They can do this just by commingling the actual content ID the link addresses with the tracking information. Facebook has already started doing this in some places [0].

For example, Facebook posts now have opaque IDs that are unique per-user. This makes it impossible to remove the tracking information and still keep a valid link. For a news site, where they want their content to be indexed by crawlers, it might not be possible to block all non-unique links, though they could certainly make it harder. We'll see what the future holds...

[0] Example of a Facebook post with an opaque per-user unique URL: https://www.facebook.com/pfbid02xQBbtJYKpp8V5j5my5jaWUVij7XC... ( Facebook will know which account shared this URL and there's no way for me to stop them o_O )

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

word of caution, any employee at Facebook will also be able to do this and be on hacker and get the same time

vic-traill• 3 years ago

Lots of mixed opinions on Brave in these comments, very interesting.

I came to use Brave via https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/. Their results on my brave browser instance are very good.

I'll admit I'm imbuing the EFF w/ a lot of confidence here, but a high confidence result from an EFF tool carries weight for me.

JohnFen6• 3 years ago

I use Brave somewhat reluctantly. In terms of privacy, I would prefer to use Firefox, but I have several issues with Firefox (mostly UI-related) that annoy me too much and that I could never figure out how to correct.

Brave is my compromise browser.

NayamAmarshe7• 3 years ago

In terms of privacy, I would never use Firefox (over Brave). Brave is much better and secure: https://privacytests.org/

neves• 3 years ago

This is a very nice feature and they should make it the default option. I really hate that when I copy a Google result page I get a reviews url

If I could just import my Firefox logins, brave would be my default browser

ChickenNugger• 3 years ago

I've been doing this manually for years. It's nice to see as a feature in my daily driver browser. It's kind of tricky manually when it looks like the GUID at the end of a URL is a tracking link when it's actually the id of the article despite part of the headline being in the URL.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

Hmm, I'm not sold on this. There's a very real danger of a new feature, which is hard to explain or understand, chasing away non-technical folks. I feel like this should be an official addon for people who want this kind of thing.

thealch3m1st• 3 years ago

It means showing the middle finger to those that track you

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 3 years ago

I've never tried Brave(no interest in using Chromium), but whenever I see them posted on HN like "look at this new feature in Brave", it's pretty much always something I've had in Firefox natively or through addons since long before Brave even existed. This is certainly no exception.

When I go to their website, they show this asinine comparison of what different browsers support out of the box, conveniently the list only includes things that Brave supports. That strongly suggests cherrypicking to me. I also want to know what a browser doesn't do, and they're conveniently leaving that out. And ok, Firefox does all of those with just a couple extra addons anyway. Comparing to naked Firefox just isn't fair.

This website makes me feel marketed to. That makes me implicitly distrust them.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

Kinda funny but I just coded up a "clean link" feature in my smart RSS reader that removes all that

   utm_medium=evil

garbage from links on ingest. On one level I wouldn't mind them knowing I find their content on their RSS feeds so they keep providing them, but I see duplicate articles because of this nonsense and also I was cutting them out manually when I posted articles to HN.

Of course when I put that URL filter in, I also added

   ARCHIVE_TODAY = "https://archive.today/submit/?url="
   return ARCHIVE_TODAY + quote_plus(url)

for sites on a list of known paywalled sites so I don't have to do that one by hand.

What does "Copy clean link" mean?

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