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Discussion on: How do "public but secret" URLs work

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Gerasimos (Makis) Maropoulos

I believe that they have a field somewhere like "public" 0 for false(private) 1 for true(public) and on internal fetch of the articles if '0' then just skip that and don't add it to the list, whatever article list is that, except when the user sees his own profile, so the author_id is the same as the logged in user, then it fetches it and client-side can generate a url based on the title, the time and the author, no need to be a true URL link if not published. However I don't know how dev.to works internally but I assume this is a good and secure solution, so no one can see the link of private/unpublished article because it doesn't exists yet.