Dumb non-programmer question--what's redir.asp?

[Hiawatha Bray]

I found this code in a website and wondered whtat it does.

<A
href="http://webmail.ibew103.com/exchweb/...&keyword=Mitt+Romney&mode=all&sorting=pubdate"
target=_blank>

Why not just use the link to the Boston Herald directly? Why redirect from
a webmail account?

Can anybody tell me? Thanks.

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

This is useful if you want to perhaps do some use tracking of what links are
clicked. The same thing with an advertisement, you want to pass the url you
want the user to go to as a parameter in a redirect page so you can track
the click, and you can also track other informaiton that you want along with
the click (as well as some data about the user).

Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage

 

[Hiawatha Bray]

So clicking this link would tell the people at ibew103 who had clicked it?

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

Here's the complete contents of redir.asp :

<% @ LANGUAGE = VBScript %>
<% response.redirect request.querystring() %>

If you use it, you can control the querystring sent.
That allows you to send parameters to the server where the request is being redirected to.

 

[Alan Silver]

Here's the complete contents of redir.asp :

<% @ LANGUAGE = VBScript %>
<% response.redirect request.querystring() %>

I suspect that's not the complete contents of the file, otherwise there
would be little point in bothering with it.

As someone else pointed out, this sort of redirecting page usually does
some logging of the fact that the link has been clicked. That way they
know how many people clicked, say, an advert. This is important for
tracking click-throughs, on which a lot of marketing revenue is based.

 

[RodPayne]

The logging gets done by IIS as part of its normal processing. If logging is turned on for the web site, then it tracks each request, normally with the client IP address, logon, full URL, etc. The web page itself does not need to do anything to update a log.