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News redirects hide target URLs from users #1913

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andrewdavidwong opened this Issue Apr 17, 2016 · 4 comments

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andrewdavidwong commented Apr 17, 2016

Links in the news section are blind redirects. They look like they're links to pages on the qubes-os.org domain, but many of them redirect users to external websites. Those links are marked by the "external link" icon, which is good. But users still can't tell exactly where they're going to be redirected before actually clicking (and almost instantly being redirected). This seems somewhat unfriendly and unsafe to our website visitors.

(The interstitial redirect page also has some bugs, e.g., literal <!DOCTYPE html> is displayed.)

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andrewdavidwong Apr 17, 2016

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Two (out of many) possible solutions:

  • Instead of redirecting, just link directly to those external sites (in the case of YouTube videos, magazine articles, etc.)
  • Prompt the user to decide whether she consents to being redirected to the external site.
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andrewdavidwong commented Apr 17, 2016

Two (out of many) possible solutions:

  • Instead of redirecting, just link directly to those external sites (in the case of YouTube videos, magazine articles, etc.)
  • Prompt the user to decide whether she consents to being redirected to the external site.

@andrewdavidwong andrewdavidwong added this to the Documentation/website milestone Apr 18, 2016

@andrewdavidwong andrewdavidwong added the UX label Apr 27, 2016

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bnvk Apr 28, 2016

Instead of redirecting, just link directly to those external sites (in the case of YouTube videos, magazine articles, etc.)

IIRC, this is tricky to do with how Jekyll's "blog post" sorting and rendering works. Maybe there is a hack around, but unsure.

Prompt the user to decide whether she consents to being redirected to the external site.

I really don't like this as it breaks the UX of simply "browsing the web" as it stops a user forcing them to read intermediary text- which reminds of my wifi captive portals, or what Fbook does to manipulate users into staying on Fbook.

Admittedly, our userbase is more security & privacy conscious than average, and blind redirects are not ideal, but seeing as that our site does not have user-generated content and every link has been vetted by one of use- is it too much to ask users to trust us that we won't redirect them somewhere malicious?

(The interstitial redirect page also has some bugs, e.g., literal is displayed.)

This should be investigated and fixed!

bnvk commented Apr 28, 2016

Instead of redirecting, just link directly to those external sites (in the case of YouTube videos, magazine articles, etc.)

IIRC, this is tricky to do with how Jekyll's "blog post" sorting and rendering works. Maybe there is a hack around, but unsure.

Prompt the user to decide whether she consents to being redirected to the external site.

I really don't like this as it breaks the UX of simply "browsing the web" as it stops a user forcing them to read intermediary text- which reminds of my wifi captive portals, or what Fbook does to manipulate users into staying on Fbook.

Admittedly, our userbase is more security & privacy conscious than average, and blind redirects are not ideal, but seeing as that our site does not have user-generated content and every link has been vetted by one of use- is it too much to ask users to trust us that we won't redirect them somewhere malicious?

(The interstitial redirect page also has some bugs, e.g., literal is displayed.)

This should be investigated and fixed!

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Admittedly, our userbase is more security & privacy conscious than average, and blind redirects are not ideal, but seeing as that our site does not have user-generated content and every link has been vetted by one of use- is it too much to ask users to trust us that we won't redirect them somewhere malicious?

Yeah, that's a fair point. If no users are actually bothered by it, then I suppose it's a non-issue.

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andrewdavidwong commented Apr 28, 2016

Admittedly, our userbase is more security & privacy conscious than average, and blind redirects are not ideal, but seeing as that our site does not have user-generated content and every link has been vetted by one of use- is it too much to ask users to trust us that we won't redirect them somewhere malicious?

Yeah, that's a fair point. If no users are actually bothered by it, then I suppose it's a non-issue.

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andrewdavidwong Mar 18, 2018

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Our practice for quite a long time now has been to write News posts in such a way that they are not blind redirects. Rather, they typically include a description of the content and the external link, so that the reader can decide whether to navigate away from the Qubes website or not.

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andrewdavidwong commented Mar 18, 2018

Our practice for quite a long time now has been to write News posts in such a way that they are not blind redirects. Rather, they typically include a description of the content and the external link, so that the reader can decide whether to navigate away from the Qubes website or not.

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