Linking to a redirecting url is suboptimal

March 21, 2002 12:37 PM

Linking to a redirector url from another site instead of the url of the article/site being talked about is sub-optimal. In this example it is a Fark redirector which points to a news site.
posted by riffola to Etiquette/Policy at 12:37 PM (8 comments total)

If you want to credit a site, a via link will do, using a redirector causes a few problems. Namely it hampers searching for double posts, and the url shown in the status bar is not the url of the site being talked about, which is misleading.
posted by riffola at 12:40 PM on March 21, 2002

On the other end of things, wouldn't this also make all the MeFi traffic from the link look like(actually be?) Fark traffic instead? This obviously wouldn't be a tragedy, but it's sort of misleading to the person checking their referrer logs.
posted by Su at 1:04 PM on March 21, 2002

Do you really expect all users to have a clue as to what you are talking about? Between "Copy Shortcut" and the MeFi link button, users do not even have to look at the link. This is like expecting someone to know the transmisision frequency of any given television channel.

posted by mischief at 2:47 PM on March 21, 2002

riffola is right: linking to an article via redirector is not only indirect (and a waste of bandwidth), it is misleading. the only way you can be sure the article is what it's advertised to be is to click through. on a related topic, there are methods to trick people into thinking a URL is not what it is reported to be; javascript is one such way. i don't think that's ever been addressed in the past since i've been here, though maybe it should? is onMouseOver (and/or related events) stripped from anchor tags when postings are made?
posted by moz at 3:14 PM on March 21, 2002

Mischief: Part of the purpose of MeTa has become to instruct users what not to do, as well as what to do. If they didn't know to pay attention to what they were linking before, maybe this thread will be a start. And your argument falls apart at "Paste," anyway, when they do have to look at the link, and hopefully realize it's not the CNN(or whatever) address they went to.
This isn't asking people to know what the transmission frequency is. It's more like misleading packaging. I open up my Goth Princess Barbie box, and instead there's Butterfly Magic Barbie inside. Not only that, but the manufacturer's sales and stock figures are off because their systems say they sold a Goth Magic Barbie to me.
posted by Su at 3:28 PM on March 21, 2002

I had a similar problem with my MeFi post yesterday. What I thought was a solid link that worked when I tested it started timing out almost immediately. Fortunately, another MeFi'er came to the rescue, with a better link, to the same newspaper. I still wonder how I missed it. I feel it detracted from the post and wasted everyone's time, even though it was a good topic. Sigh.
posted by Lynsey at 3:28 PM on March 21, 2002

But Butterfly Magic Barbie RULES! Poo on that skanky Goth Princess Barbie anyway.
posted by rodii at 5:28 PM on March 21, 2002

Moz, I believe javascript files and inline javascripts aren't allowed either after that pop-up layer incident in 2000, where someone embeded a script in a thread, and it poped up a layer saying something stupid about Matt, or when the html fixing script was incorporated.

Mischief, it really isn't hard to copy the url from the address bar of a browser window displaying the page being posted. As Su mentions above, if people don't know about it, then this MetaTalk thread will hopefully help.
posted by riffola at 6:40 PM on March 21, 2002