I would send this as a personal message, but Victor does not accept messages.
This is kinda important for a website.
If you dont know what are you talking about,or you are about to say something stupid,please skip this post.
So yeah, what are incremental numbers you may ask?
Their value changes depending on what we are counting, in this case these are users and forum posts.
So,for example, if we count apples (or registred users/forum posts in this case) the number of apples will increase by 1 for each apple (If we are using numbering system with base 10).
It's okay to use incremental numbers in that case but using it on website as address is not.
Why?
- First, you can clearly see who did register first on website https://www.lfs.net/profile/1, and exact numbers of users that are registred (as today,my new account is https://www.lfs.net/profile/1899137. (Privacy problems)
- Its too easy to mine data from user profiles.
- If someone writes a spam bot,it would be easily able to send everyone a message because you need to add one (+1) to previous URL , then when the URL is random string of characters.
- Its not really large security flaw-you can't acess private profiles this way.
I know its bit of work but I think you should switch to random generated URL for each user and for each forum post.
This is kinda important for a website.
If you dont know what are you talking about,or you are about to say something stupid,please skip this post.
So yeah, what are incremental numbers you may ask?
Their value changes depending on what we are counting, in this case these are users and forum posts.
So,for example, if we count apples (or registred users/forum posts in this case) the number of apples will increase by 1 for each apple (If we are using numbering system with base 10).
It's okay to use incremental numbers in that case but using it on website as address is not.
Why?
- First, you can clearly see who did register first on website https://www.lfs.net/profile/1, and exact numbers of users that are registred (as today,my new account is https://www.lfs.net/profile/1899137. (Privacy problems)
- Its too easy to mine data from user profiles.
- If someone writes a spam bot,it would be easily able to send everyone a message because you need to add one (+1) to previous URL , then when the URL is random string of characters.
- Its not really large security flaw-you can't acess private profiles this way.
I know its bit of work but I think you should switch to random generated URL for each user and for each forum post.