What are the characters appearing at the end of my appengine URL

Question

I have an appengine Python application. It includes the simpleauth library. I am viewing the application in Google Chrome.

After I load a page in the application, some text that looks like (for example) "#.UhJcZ2TwKa4" is appended to the end of the URL.

What is this and where does it come from?

Upon edit, maybe it's one of my javascript includes that is doing it. Here are all my javascript includes:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/static/js/tinymce/tiny_mce.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="//use.typekit.net/dvk0ttp.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="//api.filepicker.io/v1/filepicker.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

Thanks in advance,

Aaron

Answer 1

Looks like you're using AddThis APIs and you have enabled address bar tracking which appends those "strange" characters to the page url.

Those parameters are used to collect data if someone copies the URL somewhere else

If you don't want this feature, you can disable it, editing the javascript config variable for the APIs (See attached link for the tutorial)

data_track_addressbar = false;

Source: AddThis Support

Answer 2

Inserting: <script type="text/javascript"> var addthis_config = addthis_config||{}; addthis_config.data_track_addressbar = false; addthis_config.data_track_clickback = false; </script> before closing the tag cleans the URL

This is the corect resource: Removing all hashtags/anchors from your URLs