Readers are always offering colorful opinions in the comment sections of newspapers — but who knew they could leave them in the URLs of stories?
That’s what the British newspaper The Independent found out after a story about a jelly bean resembling Kate Middleton hitting eBay was posted.
Apparently, some readers weren’t pleased with the paper’s coverage of the royal nuptials.
One jokester gave the paper a jab in a URL that was edited to read: “utter PR fiction but people love this s— so f— it lets just print it.”
According to a post from Independent online editor Martin King, the Independent’s site automatically “resolves updated or incorrect URLs to the matching story ID.”
More serious commenter took to the URLs with political and social messages.
“It was designed as a feature and not a bug - and we are not alone in this problem,” King said.
The Washington Post also appears to have a problem that allows users to mess with their URLs.
But don’t expect to be able to play around with the Independent’s stories forever.
King said there are changes coming to the Independent’s site to prevent such tomfoolery.
“ We are acting urgently to find a way to avoid such abuse and hope that will be in place shortly,” he said.
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