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by myfonj 4409 days ago
Another evil that roams interwebs are "farewell" gates for outgoing links; eg dA [1].

Unlike URL shorteners which could be in rare cases useful [2] I see not a single benefit of this.

[1] http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.devianta... [2] http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-datauri (yes, this one is a misuse, but whatewer)

1 comments

What's bad about them? Blocks referer and warns of phishing.
1) Referrer obscuring: If I wanted not to enclose referrer, I'd have told my browser not to do it. (I don't want to disable this so I don't like some sites forces me to do something very similar by their design.) 1a) (Rhetorical question:) If you were site owner and were interested in incoming traffic, would you rather see 'someportal.com/outgoing?yoursite/page' or 'someportal.com/certainpage' referer header in access logs of yoursite/page?

2) Phishing protection: assuming such outgoing links are checked with Safe Browsing API or something similar (I doubt it), again, that's what my browser does by default. (Incidentally, sometimes I do not want my browser to do this either, so again I like to switch this off: things are a bit faster and free disk space bigger sometimes.) It might seem nice that some page makes this effort too, but again, I don't see a big deal in it.