Who has a problem with the way that NATS codes are output?

[b1ng0]

Do you or do you know somebody that has issues with this?

You are not alone in this. There was a thread at another board where people from nats responded basically saying they planned on allowing un-encoded url's very soon.. sounds like they haven't gotten it done yet though .

1) The reason we encode the codes is because they are SE friendlier this way and do not open them up to direct tampering.
Like John said, we are looking into adding unencoded versions to the systems too.

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BTW, also today, with our encoded codes, it is actually very easy for you to build codes for each reseller. Simply setup a reference code for each site in your system, and when someone comes to you and wants to use you for that particular site they just have to lookup the campaignid (which right now, I know is a bit of a pain to actually do) they want to use. Then you decode your reference, change the first number in the code (142:3:1 is the code in your example) and then simply reencode the result.

BTW, the code is simply base64 encoded and the (sometimes resulting) = at the end removed.

Its really not that hard to do.

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We encoded them to make them cleaner and alpha-numeric only. Thats the one and only reason.