As I understand it, Meteor doesn’t use ObjectIDs in Mongo documents and instead generates a 17(?) character string for the _id. I want to get some plain Node.js stuff working with Meteor and it seems less hassle to use Meteor’s style instead of ObjectIDs (even though I much prefer the ObjectID way… bye bye timestamps)
So is this Meteor _id literally just 17 random [A-Za-z0-9] chars? Is it case sensitive? Is there any format I need to follow?