On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Steve van der Burg wrote:

> One commonly-used way to solve this is to replace all your plain HTML
> links to external sites with links to a little, local (ie. on your
> machine or at least inside your domain) redirector. So a link like
> http://www.otherco.com/
> becomes
> http://www.myco.com/cgi-bin/oco-redi...ww.otherco.com

Indeed. And, discerning users will then suppose that you are rudely
collecting information on their behaviour (in a way that wouldn't have
been possible if you'd just used a direct web link).

In some legislations, I suspect you will require to have a published
privacy policy as to what you're intending to do with those
statistics. IANAL: take legal advice if this concerns you.

Also, if you use a delayed meta...refresh, this is considered
inherently inaccessible, so check the WAI guidelines for acceptable
procedures.

I can't help feeling that, taking all the consequences into account,
one would better dispense with this idea unless there are very
powerful reasons for doing it (e.g Google do this, but they can afford
to do it, as they are delivering a valuable service for free).

Consider whether it wouln't be better to just label the external
links differently than the internal ones, so that users can (if they
wish) see the difference before they take the link.