Without JS the button points to the RSS feed. This serves as a placeholder. The button was most likely copied and pasted.
Upon page load the website makes a call to the /rand.php endpoint, which returns a date in ISO8601 format. That is then used to produce the actual link.
I’m not the author so I’m going to speculate wildly that this may be an artifact from back when the button was introduced. SMBC wanted to encourage its readers to vote for the comic on “top webcomics” listings, and the extra comic panel was introduced as an incentive to do so - you would see it after voting. Since SMBC became popular enough that doing that was redundant, the author kept the extra panel around but took out the requirement to vote to see it.
Oh right, i have third-party scripts blocked by default on mobile. Now it works.
Still, uh, why was it made that way, that it needs JS to random-load a page?
Without JS the button points to the RSS feed. This serves as a placeholder. The button was most likely copied and pasted.
Upon page load the website makes a call to the
/rand.phpendpoint, which returns a date in ISO8601 format. That is then used to produce the actual link.<script> $.get("/rand.php",function(data){ $('.cc-navaux').attr('href','https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/' + data); }); </script>(lines 172ff. of the HTML source) Why? Ask the author.
I’m not the author so I’m going to speculate wildly that this may be an artifact from back when the button was introduced. SMBC wanted to encourage its readers to vote for the comic on “top webcomics” listings, and the extra comic panel was introduced as an incentive to do so - you would see it after voting. Since SMBC became popular enough that doing that was redundant, the author kept the extra panel around but took out the requirement to vote to see it.