Link click counters not working for 'open in new tab'?

We noticed that link counters won’t increase if you right-click on them and select ‘open in new tab’, or if you use the middle mouse button on them.

That’s because it’s a browser function, there’s no click action to catch. AFAIK the destination page won’t see a referrer either, it’s akin to copy-pasting the URL into the address bar.

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does the same issue happen for middle click or control click?

That makes sense, thanks!

It does. I included that in my post :slight_smile:

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The <a ping> attribute could be used to increment the counter.

Caveats:

  • It’s disabled by default in Firefox.
  • there don’t seem to be any JS events for it, so the counter would only visibly be updated the next time the post was visited.

NB: It seems like “mousedown” events are triggered on middle click, but that would have false positives as not every click ends up being a navigation - eg. copy link, customised browser settings.

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