That is sort of where my initial thoughts with the first outline were going. As if I send an optional parameter I can skip the actual link tracking logic for all uses except those coming from a topic.
Then I don’t have to worry about the parameters needed. But if Discourse wants those tracked I don’t think it will be hard to get that data either from the profile/history pages.
The main point was my current PR duplicates efforts, of which I’m not a big fan of but it shows it can be done.