QUOTE(Anomtai @ Oct 23 2013, 22:57)

Out of the blue question Tenb. Why do Equipment URLs have keys in them?
QUOTE(Anomtai @ Oct 23 2013, 23:46)

No, that is what the "EID" part of the URL is for.
With galleries it is the same, you have an increasing ID and a hash token. There are normally two reasons to add an extra identifier apart from a unique ID on a DB record:
1. [This is what mechafujoshi just described.] As it is a publicly accessible DB (well, through php but still publicly accessible) if there were only one unique numeric and sequential key to access it it would be very easy to do a DDoS. You would just try all ID from 1 to the latest IDs and you would have about 80% of success of hitting a page with that URL. As there is an extra token which you need to know such a crude DDoS just gets a lot of HTTP 404s and the database is not queried.
2. [This one is just a guess, it might be that the galleries/equips are not implemented this way.] The hash can be generated by applying some algorithm (e.g. SHA-1) to the full record holding the equip/gallery. If something happens to the consistency of the IDs it is still possible to find the equips/galleries through the tokens. Of course, there would be some conflicts between the records but these conflict would be few compared to the amount of galleries of equips that are in the DB.
This post has been edited by blue penguin: Oct 24 2013, 02:05