Well, that’s stupid now, isn’t it? Even stupider: I was just writing a little plugin for this (dubbed “Rehydrator” cuz that’s what it does) and it turns out that there is a bit of a bug in Bubble’s “:split by” when a URLencoded string is sent to plugins. It seems to URLdecode and then try to split, which is not the behavior in a text element.
Yields in page:
But the plugin gets the URLdecoded string, so you have to split by ", "
But ANYWHO, I built an element plugin for this (please don’t do this with List Shifter Iterate, that’s just so slow). It’s part of my commercial Floppy plugin suite, which is pretty much where all of my new work is going.
By getting that plugin, you’ll have two potential solutions to the problem, Floppy Rehydrator (the new plugin that takes lists of UIDs and rehydrates them back into their real Things), but also Floppy (which would enable you to store these lists in, e.g., sessionStorage or localStorage, instead of passing them via the URL).
Here’s how you use Floppy Rehydrator in your context:
select your data type and then pass a list of texts that are the UIDs (you can do this for up to three different types of Thing/texts pairs)
Then your rehydrated Things appear at Rehydrator’s Rehydrated Things 1, 2, or 3 outputs, as appropriate. 
Now your IDs are things again! 
