Redirecting To Another Website

CyberSEAL

Hello, I recently took over as administrator of a busy forum for fans of the
video game call of duty. The guy who was running it before me had added a
feature for ranking external websites.

Basically, when a user posted a thread that contained a link in it, a URL wa
s automatically added to the front of their link, like this:

User's Post:

http://www.mydomain.com

Forum modifies it to read:

http://www.forumdomain.com/redirect...ww.mydomain.com

The redirect.php page would add a frame to the top of the page when people c
licked on the link. Within this frame were two drop downs with numeric rank
ings for the site that is being viewed.

I have removed this ranking system since several of our moderators decided i
t was a bad idea. However, there are thousands of posts on our message boar
d that still have the "http://www.forumdomain.com/redirect.php?" added to th
e front of links placed in them.

Could someone help me craft a replacement redirect.php file that will simply
redirect the users to the site in the link? Does this make sense?

🙂

wilku

The script with redirection would look like:

<?php //this must be the first thing in the file (no spaces, no newlines)
if (isset($_GET['page'])) //I don't know if it's the real name of your varible
{
  header("Location: $_GET[page]");
 exit;
}
else echo "You must specify a page";
?>

The odther (more elegant?) solution would be to replace the string with redirection in messages bodies. The way to do it would be to SELECT from forum database posts that are LIKE %http://www.forumdomain.com/redirect.php% , read them via php script, for each post body [man]str_replace()[/man] this addres (with name of the GET varible) to an empty string, and lastly UPDATE your database

CyberSEAL

Hi wilku, and thanks so much for the reply. I have so far been unable to get your code to work. By variable, are you talking about a system variable or something that was inherent to the first script (redirect.php) I mentioned?

I was thinking about searching the database and trying to remove all the "http://www.forumdomain.com/redirect.php" instances, so I may take your advice there...

I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your code, but shouldn't I be able to create a new redirect.php page that simply shoots the user to the URL that is passed to it?

wilku

The problem is, I don't know how the page to redirect to, is passed to redirect.php script. My script, as is written above, would work if it is passed like redirect.php?page=www.mydomain.com
To tell how is it passed you can use var_dump($GET) in your redirect.php or just see the full address that is written in posts.
If it's passed like a key (redirect.php?www.mydomain.com) use [man]key/man instead of $GET['page'] - of course with little modifications:
- check if the result of key() isn't empty, instead of checking if the $_GET[page] exists.
- you cannot put function inside a string (in header) so assigh result to some varible and put the varible in the string.

If you'll post here the exact address of redirect.php (the most important part is not visible now - ... ) and would not be able to adapt the script above, I'll write it.

I've just noticed that this board shortens urls a bit so give the part only from redirect.php?...