What is this web page?

General
1

I accidentally found this page while looking for a guy on iNat, when I pressed the follow button (never happened before, never happened again).

https://www.inaturalist.org/users/7838074.json?friend_id=6526005

So I was wondering, what is it really?

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PS: Love the ‘pretty-print‘ button :)

2

I suppose it’s the data used to load the users page.

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4

this isn’t really a webpage. it’s the response from the old iNaturalist API, delivered in JSON format and interpreted by your browser.

the first part provides information about you:
https://www.inaturalist.org/users/7838074.json

the second part would be a parameter. presumably it would provide the server information about which user you wanted to follow, but i’m not sure that it actually would do anything in this context. there are different kinds of requests you can make to the API. in this case, you’re making a GET request, which is just reading data. maybe if when clicking the button the page made a PUT request, it could have updated your account to have that other person as someone you follow.

if the follow button isn’t actually causing the system to update your profile to follow the person, then i would say that there’s a bug here.

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5

but why is the follow button on https://www.inaturalist.org/users/7838074 profile redirecting in sch a way? seems to be a bug

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6

i just tested following kueda, and the follow button worked just fine.

i think what’s happening is that if you click the button, it does make the request as a PUT, but if you, say, right-click the button and choose to open as a link in a new tab or window, then it issues this as a GET. so i think the issue is just that the design of the page never anticipated that a user might do the latter sort of action, and if there’s a bug here, it’s just that the system shouldn’t allow for that second workflow to occur… but it’s such a minor bug that i doubt it’s worth fixing.

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7

interesting, yea the button works as intended, and every profile has the issue with copying the link

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8

I’ve noticed similar ‘ghost’ issues with URLs on the site before. It almost sounds like a clipboard formatting error or a bug with how the site generates that specific link preview. Have you tried opening the link in an incognito window to see if it’s a browser cache thing, or does it happen across the board? Definitely worth flagging for the devs if it’s reproducible!

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