Outgoing link checker

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nesman
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As long as mod requests are being made here...

Noticing the spam problem that forums are having lately with users hiding links in their first posts, I wonder if it would be useful to create a mod that changes the nature of links, so that the site admin could monitor outgoing links.

I guess it wouldn't be incredibly useful, as you probably wouldn't notice them untill Googlebot indexed them anyway, but it might be cool to change the way phpbb creates links. Instead of just creating the link directly, maybe it could link to something like http://forums.cricketmx.com/outgoing.ph ... r.web/site

Then, outgoing.php could be something as simple as (a working version of):

Code: Select all

echo _POST[link]  (I'll pretty this up in a bit.  I've got a nice piece of example code for it that I can't find :)
Edit: ok, can't find my example. No problem, since this is the easy part anyway. The hard part would be figuring out how phpbb converts BBCode into html. Anyway, something like this would do as a start for outgoing.php:

Code: Select all

<?php header("Location: $_GET[link]");
exit;
?>
This is the simple version. More complicated versions would involve a bit of database interaction to keep track of the most popular outgoing links.

(Now that I think about it, I bet somebody else has already done this) :)
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battye
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Good idea Nes :)

The only problem I see with it, is it might be unfair on those with legitimate outgoing links (as it would affect their Google pagerank)?
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