Link redirects from answers?

Question

Not sure if there's a problem... I had a link in this response: How do I convert a .vhd disk image to work with VMWare Fusion 2?

The link was edited out with a claim as too many redirects. I checked the link, worked fine and no redirects. I rolled back the edit, clicked the link and got the redirects! Edited the response to copy and paste known/good link. Still redirects when I click. However, if I paste same link into address bar is fine.

[note: the links don't redirect if you click them from the answer's versions page. Only redirects when the link is in the current version of the answer]

Is some aspect of superuser.com or the SE framework passing links through another "layer" that is doing those redirects?

Answer 1

That site apparently uses the HTTP referer header which is part of an HTTP request initiated by clicking a link to redirect your request.

^{Not so in Safari 5, which seriously broke tabbed browsing, it's not even funny; therefore I couldn't reproduce the issue at first.}

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Using curl and manually setting the HTTP referer header:

$ curl --include http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/01/02/883/ 2>/dev/null | head -n8
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:12:59 GMT
Server: Apache
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
WP-Super-Cache: Served legacy cache file
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

$ curl --referer "http://superuser.com/questions/48968/how-do-i-convert-a-vhd-disk-image-to-work-with-vmware-fusion-2" --include http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/01/02/883/
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:12:46 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://replicawatches-s.com/oem
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html

$ curl --referer "disk" --include http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/01/02/883/
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:19:36 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://replicawatches-s.com/oem
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html

So it just requires "disk" to be present in the referer for the redirect to occur.

For that reason I edited the post to require users to copy the link and added an explanation.

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I just now noticed it's your blog. I suggest you call your provider.