隐藏变量传递给php GET？

Question

I'm building a mad libs app and when the user submits the form I have all the variables shown in the url which is nice as its accessible by the program and you can share the url with your friends. I was wondering if there was a way to encode the URL in such a way that it looks like random letters to the user, but the variables are still passed. I don't want to have to store all the generated stories in a database. I don't want to use POST as that will make the page inaccessible for friends to view. Should I just stick with leaving all the variables up there to see?

Answer 1

You could store the results of the form submission in a database and have the ID be pasted in the URL. Then, if you want to make things a little less obvious then you could change the base of that integer to something like base16 or higher (so 12 => A). This way if you have other responses of the exactly same data then you could reuse those IDs.

The URL would end up being:

http://madlipswebsite.com/submission?i=XXXXX

Keep in mind that if you plan on internationalizing your application then its a better idea that you don't store the actual values inside of the URL.