Do referral hashes need a URL?

Referral programs from other sites generate a URL with hash codes to represent the referrer. When a URL is sent and accompanied by friends and family, some points or recognition system assigns a referrer defined by a hash code ... but why a hash code? Why not a user id?

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I see several reasons:

  • User ID malfunction for privacy purposes.
  • Adds an abstraction layer so you can track where the referral came from. e.g. Hash # 1 for links from stackoverflow, Hash # 2 for links from expert-sexchange (sic), etc.
  • It’s very trivial if the user IDs are just numbers, so that an attacker can’t just try all possible user IDs and dial a lot of fake referrals in sequence.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1341670/


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