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Or just use ints and encrypt them when you want to return them to the user.

I like the general idea, but the page you linked explicitly states that it isn't meant to be used to hide (user) IDs, or actually encrypt data.

Touché. The project used to be called hashids, but I guess they renamed it when they weren’t actually hashes

NB: may be more accurate to call this hashing, versus encryption

Actually, it's not hashing either, it's just encoding. Anyone who knows the alphabet can easily decode them.

To make this secure, some secret salt value needs to be added before hashing.

thank you for clarifying

My link didn’t link to there library I thought it was. We encrypted ids at Yelp, not hashed them.