Outbound link tracking breaks special links with #

[Zeit08]

Issue Summary

Same as the the closed issue 20492

I have a few links that directly open a chat with me on Signal and SimpleX apps. Ghost puts ?ref=mydomain.com there, breaking the functionality.

Example of correct link, as seen in the Editor page:

The same link in the published page (notice the ref somewhere at the beginning):

Simple solution: disable outbound links tracking in specified single pages (a toggle on the right sidebar)
Complete solution: find a way to recognize this special links with #

Steps to Reproduce

1. Enable Outbound link analytics
2. use Simplex, Signal or other special links with #

Ghost Version

5.101.1

Node.js Version

not sure

How did you install Ghost?

PikaPods

Database type

MySQL 5.7

Browser & OS version

Firefox on Fedora 41

Relevant log / error output

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to be friendly and polite to people in this repository

[vikaspotluri123]

Assuming the ref is still added, what URL are you expecting? The behavior seems correct:

var demo = new URL('https://example.com')
demo.searchParams.set('query', 'ghost')
demo.hash = '/?key=value'
demo.toString()
// 'https://example.com/?query=ghost#/?key=value'
new URL('https://example.com/?query=ghost#/?key=value').hash
// '#/?key=value'

[Zeit08]

I am expecting that these special links are being ignored by the ref mechanism, otherwise they simply do not work. I am unsure it is possible to implement a ref mechanism to these kind of links.

[vikaspotluri123]

Can you clarify what doesn't work, and where? From my example, it looks like it's behaving correctly.

[Zeit08]

As stated in my first post, Signal and Simplex contact links do not work if the outbound link tagging is active. To check by yourself you would have to use Signal or Simplex app and see that these links work:

https://signal.me/#eu/m5jaUkG5pJ9MkzGKKV60KKzUClgIVvL27dO5g_MDiHN9-Uj5N-lO8JwScTG1x2CF

https://simplex.chat/contact#/?v=2-7&smp=smp%3A%2F%2FPtsqghzQKU83kYTlQ1VKg996dW4Cw4x_bvpKmiv8uns%3D%40smp18.simplex.im%2FP1j29POWtqdyCAgzR2hvtMfyUSYofcrc%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-3%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAq83FFekNLYC1DnPmOyytP_QRj_vw_tOY8ZH2ZUfdmlU%253D%26srv%3Dlyqpnwbs2zqfr45jqkncwpywpbtq7jrhxnib5qddtr6npjyezuwd3nqd.onion

Whereas these one do not:

https://signal.me/?ref=digidati.art#eu/m5jaUkG5pJ9MkzGKKV60KKzUClgIVvL27dO5g_MDiHN9-Uj5N-lO8JwScTG1x2CF

https://simplex.chat/contact?ref=digidati.art#/?v=2-7&smp=smp%3A%2F%2FPtsqghzQKU83kYTlQ1VKg996dW4Cw4x_bvpKmiv8uns%3D%40smp18.simplex.im%2FP1j29POWtqdyCAgzR2hvtMfyUSYofcrc%23%2F%3Fv%3D1-3%26dh%3DMCowBQYDK2VuAyEAq83FFekNLYC1DnPmOyytP_QRj_vw_tOY8ZH2ZUfdmlU%253D%26srv%3Dlyqpnwbs2zqfr45jqkncwpywpbtq7jrhxnib5qddtr6npjyezuwd3nqd.onion

They are being opened anyway (so this is not a 404) but they do not work on Signal nor Simplex app, meaning they do not open a chat with the designated contact (me in this case).

[vikaspotluri123]

Thanks for sharing the full links.

This looks to be an issue for URLs that directly open to an app.

• With Signal Desktop (click link in browser to open Signal Desktop), neither link works.
• With Simplex Desktop, I get a QR code that points to the URL. This looks fine.
• With Signal Mobile, both links work if I paste them into Safari and click the button to open the Signal app.
• With Signal Mobile, if I open the link from an app (i.e. not through the browser), the unref'd link does not work, but the ref'd link does.
• I don't use Simplex so I'm not planning on installing the app to test.

[mike182uk]

I believe Ghost is doing the correct thing here (by appending ref to the searchParams here), but it is obviously not aware of the different routing schemes that apps may use the fragment for. In the case of the simplex.chat link, the fragment contains a query string, but this is considered part of the fragment and not the query (which would usually appear before the fragment as per RFC 3986 - scheme:[//authority]path[?query][#fragment]).

Im not sure if we could robustly handle this - We could put logic in to check if there is a fragment and either not append the ref, or append the ref to a querystring embedded in the fragment, but this would break functionality for users that do want the original behaviour because they are not using the fragment for any type of routing