[andybak]

I actually like this. Assuming you agree there are non-creepy reasons to track clicks (not a given on HN) then this lets you keep your urls nice and clean when people just want to copy and paste them.

I imagine it might break in some scenarios (the url ends up with junk in it from bad unicode conversion) but it's up to you to be permissive in the urls you accept.

[matt_morgan]

There are non-creepy reasons for click-tracking--e.g., you're a nonprofit supporting a cause, trying to identify preferences of your supporters. But caution: it might become creepy when you /appear/ to be hiding the tracking from your supporters. Why not give them readable URLs and be totally upfront about what you're doing?

[x1798DE]

I don't think creepy stuff is less creepy if you're not doing it for profit.

[userbinator]

I usually remove trailing spaces from URLs, and a lot of auto-linkifying processes (if they're Unicode-aware) will likely strip them too, so I predict this method won't be robust enough to survive a lot of the handling that URLs are often subject to.

If I'm filling out some form fields with URLs, I strip trailing (and leading) spaces too.

[onion2k]

These are zero width characters. There's no reason why they have to be at the end of the URL.