External link gateway

This module helps you organizing (and, well, kinda obfuscating) outgoing links from your site. There are different reasons why one would want to do so, e.g.:

• You do not want to know the target sites' owners where exactly from your site their visitors come.
• You want to add an explicit disclaimer to all links (a function very appreciated by site owners in internet and link phobic countries or those with too much internet lawyers all around, like e.g. Germany).
• You are polite enough to wave good bye each single user.

Features

This module consists of two (D7)/four (D6) components:

1. An input format filter.
2. Additional display formats for link fields (which also work with views).
3. A simple user profile field filter (D6 only; not needed in D7).
4. An experimental "overall page content filter" (D6 only; unsuitable in D7).

How it works

All of them check for links to be considered external (you may configure the criteria globally) and, if they find some, these will be transformed to no longer link directly to the external URL but to a gateway page the text of which can be set up individually.

To avoid abuse, a referer Check is also done so that if someone links to your gateway page even with the appropriate parameters, there will not be displayed a clickable link (but only the external URL in case the client's browser blocks HTTP_REFERER headers).

Requirements and recommendations

While CCK/field API integration is possible, both CCK and the link field module are not mandatory.

However, the link detection in the input format filter will only work with links which are really links. That means that only structures like

<a href="protocol://domain.tld/...">

will be modified. Thus, if you want everything that looks like a link to be treated just as one, the URL filter is recommended.

Related modules

To have filterable fields at all, you need:

• CCK (D6 only)
• link module (both D6 and D7)