external links without protocol broken for works

[RayBB]

If someone adds a link that does not start with http:// or https:// to the "links" field of a work it will not be clickable.

Evidence / Screenshot (if possible)

csv of works with non-http links
non-http-links.csv

Relevant url?

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL31995430M/I_Am_Brown_and_Beautiful

with link www.imaginemecbp.com

Creates: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL31995430M/www.imaginemecbp.com

Steps to Reproduce

1. Add a link with a protocol
2. Click on said link

• Actual: link redirects to current page
• Expected: link goes to publisher

Proposal & Constraints

As far as I can tell, there is no way to force anchor tags to take something like "www.mysite.com" and assume it is an external link. You must prepend the protocol of http or https.

There are a few things that we can do to address this:

• Stop new bad links from being added
  • client side js option - probably good enough but not full proof since JS can be disabled. broader opportunity here to encourage links to be added as identifiers when relevant
  • server side validation - I'm not sure what precedent we have for this but I imagine it won't be simple
• Fix the data currently in the DB - currently about 238 books that seem to have this issue
• if http is missing, add it at render time - probably the most hacky but easiest to do

Related files

Stakeholders

[LeadSongDog]

@mekarpeles This begs for malicious spam. We should never transparently redirect to a user-added outside link. At the very least the patron should be made aware of which external site the link goes to.