Curiousity: .php?s=

(I hope this is close enough to be relevant here)

What do the numbers in the TMF's URLs mean ?

I'm talking about the big long strings of numbers and letters after the "/forumdisplay.php?s=" in the URL. They appear to be 32 character strings of digits and lower case letters.

The first part looks like this...

http://www.ticklingforum.com/forumdisplay.php?s=

Then the changing number part looks like this...

41ca4b76a7d59292759bc1e0186182b0

The third part looks like this...

&forumid=4


The second part is the one that always/sometimes changes.


I noticed that sometimes my browser "remembers" the URL with that exact same string, and sometimes it doesn't.

I did a couple of experiements and found that...

-- Exiting my browser, then restarting it, retains the number

-- Disconnecting from my ISP, then reconnecting, changes the number

The numbers represent how the forum keeps track of where what you are looking at is.

Myriads