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I noticed an interesting quirk in the URL format for sharing questions that I'm curious about. I could be wrong, but the following all appear to be valid links to the same question:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194959/do-the-benefits-of-having-so-in-multiple-languages-outweigh-the-risks-involved
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194959
http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/194959/227680
http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/194959

The first is the full URL of the question linked. In the second I trimmed off the "do-the-benefits-of-having-so-in-multiple-languages-outweigh-the-risks-involved" snippet. The third one is the URL suggested when the "Share" button is clicked on said question, and the fourth is the "Share" button URL with the "227680" snippet trimmed off.

Why is the "227680" snippet included? What does this signify? The fourth URL functions perfectly, so why do we opt to distribute the format seen in the third one instead?

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2 Answers 2

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The first link is the search engine optimized link which is better for indexing by search engines, while the second link is just the question ID and nothing else.

In the third link you posted: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/194959/227680 your user id is included to indicate that you are the user who referred the person visiting that link to the question. There are three badges: Announcer, Booster, and Publicist for a share link associated with your user id being visited by a certain number of unique IP addresses.

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Apparently it's the User ID and I'm not very observant. Thanks to @Bart for his comment.

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