h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The new format for exterior links (for instance):

threw up a problem for me yesterday.

Whenever h2g2 is having problems, whether because of the servers or SSO, exterior links won't work. During a period of 'Service unavailable' messages yesterday afternoon I found that not only could I not get an h2g2 page up, but I couldn't open an exterior link in a conversation I already had open, apparently because the link depends on the relevant BBC site being up, which h2g2 wasn't for a while. My browser (Mozilla) was showing 'Connecting to host: bbc.co.uk', which always means a timeout or an error message.

I did manage to get to the website by copying the link, pasting it into my address bar and then editing out the bit, but you shouldn't have to do that, right? And a lot of people might not know that you can do that.

Is this new format for exterior links a method for the BBC to either collect information about where their subscribers are going to, or perhaps to somehow inform other websites out there that bbc.co.uk is out there and popular? Or is thre another reason for it?

It's been changed so the BBC can measure how many people go to external websites from the BBC. One of the BBC's goals is to drive traffic to the rest of the internet, not simply keep all its traffic inside bbc.co.uk. So this is to measure how well we're doing that.

But I wonder if these links are actually incorrect. They shouldn't have to go through the DNA servers in order to do the linking. I'll have to check with people who know.

Thanks for the reply Jim. Next time h2 has problems I'll try an outside link and see if the same thing happens.

"Next time h2 has problems I'll try an outside link and see if the same thing happens."

You'll have a long wait!

Another problem with exterior links: F113555?thread=658376 (post 2).