External links don't work when meta-refresh disabled
 

I recently disabled meta-refresh in IE8 (in order to prevent various news websites from auto-refreshing every minute or two).

An unintended consequence of this is that in FT, I can no longer just click on a link to an externally referenced site - they're coded to use a redirect function ( "redirect-to/?redirect=http%3A"(etc) ).

I'm curious to know why links are created this way? I could imagine the technique being used for Ad revenue, but just to link to a referenced external site, what is the benefit as opposed to just linking directly to the site?
(Please excuse my ignorance in asking this - I'm sure there's a very simple explanation.)

Seems I need to either re-enable meta-refresh in the brower I use for Ft, or manually copy the link info, editing it so that I can I can paste the actual destination URL into another window (which involves changing the URL characters back to ascii). Possibly the best compromise is to use Firefox with refresh-blocker - the link still doesn't work, but it at least then displays the external link information as a subsequent clickable link.

Hello,

I would suggest that you change the setting back, or change browsers. As to the general question of how links are programmed, I really can't asnwer that; may be a question for a tech forum on a different website ;)

This is done on private forums [like OMNI] to maintain your privacy.

Let's say you create a thread called "I hate Bill Smith" and in that thread you link to Bill Smith's website.

If someone clicks on that link, they will show up in Bill Smith's website's referrer logs as coming from the page http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/123456-i-hate-bill-smith.html. When Bill goes to investigate, he can't follow the link because it's a private forum. Drama ensues, and long story short, someone posts in the technical issues forum that we should obfuscate outgoing links in private forums.

As a web developer, I would not recommend disabling redirects to anyone. They are a very common practice and most often done for the user's benefit. If a thread here is moved, for example, we want to make sure that users are still able to find them, so we leave a redirect. If we rename a forum, all of the links to that forum will be broken, so we put in a redirect. This isn't because we're trying to do something mischievous-- we do it for the user.