Description of problem: The “place_id” codes in the URL bar are now long/complicated, making it harder to do various things.
Step 1: Type a location into the “place” bar on the Identify Page
Step 2: Take a look at that mad crazy “place ID” code in the URL bar above
This started about two days ago. The old codes (e.g., United States = 1) still work if you type them directly into the URL bar. But if you instead type the place into the location bar, you get this new, long/complicated code.
I suspect this change wasn’t purposeful, and it’s certainly not helpful to the user experience, thus the bug report. There are various workarounds, but this change makes it harder, for example, to manipulate URL Search terms. If this was purposeful, by all means go ahead and resolve this report, but if not, fixing this would be appreciated!
Over the past week or so, place_id numbers have been replaced by long strings in URLs from place searches in the Identify portal. Searching for a place adds a long string to the place_id in the URL instead of the simplified place_id number.
For example, selecting the United States from the place drop-down search in the Identify portal changes the place_id to “981d9cf2-e161-4c66-af02-493dc335be47” when it should be “1.” This happens with every place I tested.
This does not seem to happen in Explore, or when you click the “Identify” button to go to the Identify portal from Explore. The original place_id numbers still function normally if used to modify the URL directly in Identify.
