Forum:How to jump to a random page on Biostars?

Question

[venu]

Hello all,

I am a new user of Biostars and also a beginner of Bioinformatics. I love to spend/waste my time here a lot. I've missed a lot of tools and important questions from the starting day of Biostars. I tried to go to the first page / or at least the page number that comes to my mind. I did not find this kind of feature that allows me to jump to a random page. Currently there are 653 pages, if I want to go to first page it takes a lot of time to go using next option.

Is it possible to jump to a random page with the current version of Biostars? If yes, where can I find this feature? If not, is it possible to include this feature in next version?

Answer 1

[PoGibas]

Page number format:

https://www.biostars.org/?page=X&sort=update&limit=all%20time&q=
                               ^

• Page 1: https://www.biostars.org/?page=1&sort=update&limit=all%20time&q=
• Page 10: https://www.biostars.org/?page=10&sort=update&limit=all%20time&q=
• Page 20: https://www.biostars.org/?page=20&sort=update&limit=all%20time&q=

Answer 2

[Michael]

Like this? https://www.biostars.org/?page=666&sort=update&limit=all%20time&q=

[venu]

Thank you. It wastes my time even more :)

[Ram]

The tech of using URL to pass parameters is called query string (actually, it's the latter part of the URL that is the actual query string). You can observe this in a lot of websites, where the URL goes <base_url>?parameter1_name=parameter1_value&parameter2_name=parameter2_value&...

Example: Google

https://www.google.com/?safe=off&q=biostars+random+page

That's a google search with safe search off and searching for the query "biostars random page"

A point worth noting is, the parameters passed are usually public/visible ones. Passing a password, for example, would be a really bad implementation as URL is plaintext (visible to, readable by everyone).