[slix]

Originally Posted by rrr

Feature Suggestion:

A cool feature/option for this hack would be if when you typed in bob, the script used a redirect link, like: yoursite.com/forum/autolink.php?l=1

So if you wanted bob to link to bob.com, you would enter that in the AdminCP, and it would create the redirect link that would actually be used in the forum.

Where this would be useful, would be to track how many people are actually clicking on the link (useful to let advertisers know how many clicks they are getting).

It would also be useful to hide or shorten long affiliate links. Sometimes, people are less likely to click a link if they think it is an affiliate link, and the redirect would make it so that if you had a really long link or one with special characters, it would still turn out to just be a simple autolink.php?l=1 link in the forum.

Not all users of the hack would want this feature activated, so maybe it could be something optional?

Either way, great hack!

I use a separate tracker, one that I use for tracking to and from many sites. I don't think this is a feature that should be built into the autolinker hack, because to get a good level of click tracking and monitoring, you need a dedicated script that would dwarf the autolinker hack!

I would suggest you invest in a dedicated tracking script. I have mine on a dedicated domain that is nice and short, and created a subdomain called "a" to replace www with something shorter. On the end of that goes a short tracking number. The funny thing is, google and inktomi often pick my tracking links up, and list the actual tracking link it's self rather than the target. That's prety cool, because I can track hits direct from search engines, and send SE traffic straight to my advertisers. That's fluke though. If I tried to do that, I would surely fail!