I was just sitting there, waiting for the weekly build to finish. You know how it is. It says forty minutes, but you know it’s really gonna be closer to an hour and a half, maybe two hours if the coffee machine is acting up. I hate that kind of dead time.
I had pulled up a couple of sites just to burn time. My old buddy, Dave, he always sends me these stupid horoscope links. I don’t believe in any of that stuff, not really, but it’s a good way to kill five minutes, read something vague, and then forget about it. He’d sent me this one link for the weekly Pisces thing.
The Setup: Seeing the Mess
I clicked it, read the usual nonsense about ‘a change is coming’ and ‘watch your finances,’ whatever. But I’m one of those people who just always looks at the address bar. Always have. It’s a habit you pick up when you spend half your life writing scripts that talk to other servers. And this URL was a nightmare. Long, chunky, full of weird ampsigns and equals signs. A total mess.
I noticed the pattern straight away, though. I always do.
- It had the website name. Standard.
- Then the path, like `website type week`. Okay.
- Then the main parameters: `&sign=pisces`. That made perfect sense.
- Then this extra bit at the end: `&code=3706`.
That number. `3706`. It just looked too specific to be a timestamp, and too random to be a hash or a date format. My developer brain immediately tagged it: This looks like a primary key. Let’s practice breaking it.
The Practice: Messing With The Code
I didn’t think about it. I just went up there to the address bar and started deleting stuff. First, I wanted to isolate what the code was doing. I changed the sign part. I typed in `&sign=capricorn`. Hit enter. Yep, the text instantly changed, all the standard Capricorn predictions showed up. The `&code=3706` part stayed exactly the same. Good. So the code wasn’t tied to the zodiac sign itself at all. It was something else.
Next up, the variable I actually cared about: the code. I didn’t even bother trying to go backwards first. I went straight forward. I changed the `3706` to `3707`. Pressed the button. What did it do?
The page loaded instantly. The content was completely new. Looked like the prediction for the next week. The main date display at the top also looked like it had shifted by exactly one week. Huh. That was almost too easy. It was just sequential.
I tried it again. Changed it to `3708`. Same thing. New content. The week advanced again. It was definitely just adding one to the sequence ID.
Then I got a little bold.
I tried to really break the whole thing. I typed in `1`. The server just spat out an error message. A proper old 404, or maybe an internal error log, I don’t remember exactly, but it was ugly. So the codes didn’t start from zero or one, or they didn’t keep archives that far back.
I went back to the last working one, `3706`. Then I tried going backwards, dropping the number significantly but not all the way down to one. I typed in `3650`. Hit enter. It loaded! It was old content, way back from maybe a year ago judging by the dates displayed on the page. It worked just fine. It was just archived content.
The Realization: What it All Meant
After about twenty minutes of this stupid, pointless back-and-forth, hitting refresh and watching the content change, the answer was clear as day. The build was only halfway done, so I had plenty of time to fully appreciate my finding.
The number, that mysterious `3706` in the URL, isn’t some secret key, it isn’t a complex cryptographic hash, and it sure as hell isn’t anything mystical about the alignment of the stars. It’s just an internal content ID.
They likely have some database filled with years and years of weekly predictions, and every single entry gets a simple, sequential ID number. It probably started at ID number 1, and right now, this week’s content is simply ID number 3706 in their system. The developer who set up the site just decided to expose that ID directly in the URL instead of using a date variable or something cleaner. I’ve been there. Sometimes you’re just tired on a Friday afternoon and that’s the fastest way to get the content to render. It was a stupid, pointless exercise, but it was my exercise. It got me through a dead time wait.
