Reasons not to URL encode anything that will appear on your site:

[denny]

http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay ?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=3801&productId=159623 &Trail=C%24cip%3D28884.Kinky%2Bsex%2Btoys%3EC%24cip%3D28915.Gentle%2Bpenetration%2Bdevices&categoryId=28915

Check out the department and sub-department, above the image.

(mis-feature discovered by cryx and further abused by wechsler)

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

That's a locked post, but you did indeed discover that any old text was good.

I've had mixed results with truncated URLs, including your examples. People who are sent to a shortened URL as their first hit on the site often report an error, even though they all seem to be working fine for me.