How can I stop onebox redirection?

Hello,

Consider a situation for an affiliate marketer…

where path http://x.com/go/discourse/ is HTTP 301 to https://discourse.org/ref=1 again HTTP 301 to https://discourse.org/

Problem is when I type first link, in onebox it automatically redirect to the final destination which is causing loss of revenue.

Please help me in disabling onebox and redirection for the specific path http://x.com/go/*

I want when I type http://x.com/go/discourse/ link should be as it is without modification.

Thanks

You should be able to goto Admin -> Settings -> Onebox -> Onebox Domains Blacklist to get the result you want

Thanks for the response.

I am sorry to inform, It’s not working. :frowning:

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You haven’t entered a domain in the domain blacklist.

Onebox Blacklist option is not working. Ref: video
https://www.useloom.com/share/f196f419ade04167b5e8a18b1c6f1126

Can you repro this @jomaxro?

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I can sort-of repro this.

Entering meta.discourse.org into onebox domains blacklist correctly prevents oneboxes of meta.discourse.org links. However, entering gulshankumar.net and www.gulshankumar.net into the setting does not prevent the oneboxing of https://www.gulshankumar.net/go/sucuri-website-firewall.

Wait so the OP wants to prevent SELF oneboxing? That’s really weird.

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www.gulshankumar.net isn’t an internal onebox. Discourse appears to be at help.gulshankumar.net - www.gulshankumar.net appears to be a WP site.

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Still this might be an unreasonable edge case if it is the same domain. Why wouldn’t you want to onebox your own stuff?

I think the intent is to post referer links without them being obvious referer links but still have them be referer links.

For example, preserving the “u=mittineague” query string.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-can-i-stop-redirection/81515/12?u=mittineague

I’m not certain about what kind of RewriteRule voodoo is going on or what domains are involved.

To me, the obvious solution would be to display the link as a link and not onebox it. eg.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-can-i-stop-redirection/81515/12?u=mittineague

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Hello,

I appreciate your curiosity, why I wouldn’t like Onebox. The major issue is redirection which happens due to Onebox.

Basically, to keep affiliate URLs short, memorable and easily managed at one place, I use redirection. I use Affiliate Link Lite plugin to convert ugly affiliate link to the branded form.

https://www.gulshankumar.net/go/any-product-name/

What I am expecting, If I type my affiliate URL, Onebox shoudn’t display final destination instead of clocked path (which is /go/).

Exactly. Thanks for understanding.

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@codinghorror I’m hitting this same basic issue on my forum, wondering if there’s yet any way to force the onebox blacklist to work on sibling domains please?

In my case I have forum.x.org and archive.x.org. The latter uses the forum as an sso provider to allow entry. When entering a url from the archive, it gets oneboxed, and the url gets redirected as far as a forum.x.org/session/sso_provider?sso=..... link, which if clicked on then results in an error page.

@codinghorror Ah, I’ve just checked something this morning, and it only seems to be doing it for links that had been oneboxed (with a bad redirected link) before I put the archive domain into the onebox blacklist. So there must be a onebox cache? Any idea how to remove links from that?

You can add a query string like

example.com/link?x

If you want to forcefully break caching.

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Thanks, good to know. Seems that it fell out of the cache on it’s own in time, so sorted out now, but useful in case of any future issues.

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