Please help me understand why "Support WAD" link does not work correctly but if I put in the final URL into the menu ("Support WAD (long)", it does work.

This is from a real person. I did not appreciate my original ticket getting closed as spam.

As i showed iin the original issue the yourls link does NOT work. It is nothing to do with Joomla. Even if I click on the link directly from github it does not work.

If you go direct to this website: https://visit.wisdeaf.org/ and then click on the donate it DOES REDIRECT to the page it is supposed to go to.

thats because if you look at the code of that page the link is NOT the yourls short link but the full url

Thank you.

My point here is that the "Support WAD" link as seen from the Joomla backend (screenshot below)

It shows a link that is supposed to go to https://visit.wisdeaf.org/donate and then YOURLs processes that link and redirects to the Zeffy page. I could say it's a 2 hop link before reaching the final page. YOURLs is a link tracking system and it tracks the hits, clicks, etc. (YOURLs is also open source and its on GitHub, too)

What I'm saying is:
a) clicking on friendly "Support WAD" (short) link does not go to https://visit.wisdeaf.org/donate YOURLs is supposed to redirect to the Zeffy link and record the tracking info.

b) clicking on the non-friendly long link "Support WAD (long)" does go to the correct page. But YOURLs will not track that redirect because it didn't go through YOURLs

I need the tracking information.

I do see what you're saying and I see your reasoning that it has nothing to do with Joomla. But it seems to me that the Joomla link has something that is preventing the link to reach the final destination or not letting YOURLs finish processing the short link

I will look at YOURLs and see if there is something within that app that is preventing the. redirects from working.

Again, I prefer to use short links so that I can track the traffic including geolocation data. Since I just proved that the non-friendly long links which has meaningless URLs works fine. But again, I prefer to use something that is easy to remember and not have to copy/paste the long URL.

Another reason for using the short links (YOURLs) si that at some point in time, the final page could change to a different page/URL. It is much easier to change the. long URL in the YOURLs system rather than having to go through every single article and menu link with the long URLs to update each to the new URL. By using the short link, I don't have to take the time to go through all the articles and menu links. That's the beauty of using short links

And like I said in the closed ticket ...this behavior worked just fine in Joomla 3. (before SEO)

And please keep in mind, I"m a volunteer webmaster so I don't have the time to go through every article/menu to update URLs when it changes. That's why I use short links so I don't have to update anything in Joomla -- only in YOURLs.

I would encourage you to go look at YOURLs -- it's open source and here on GitHub.

There is a reason why I use short links. I only have to update the short links in ONE place versus having to go through every article, module and menu item links to update if the long URL changes. (like if we decide to change our Donate page to a new campaign page which will have a different URL).

I am perfectly familiar with yourls as we use it here at the joomla project But thats irrelevant.
YOUR yourls link does NOT work. It doesnt matter if you put that yourls link in joomla or a static html page or even here on github. It doesnt work - your problem is with yourls. I already showed you that the link doesnt work here on github. It is NOTHING to do with Joomla. Let me show you another video using the link posted in your previous post. So clearly nothing to do with Joomla at all and it does NOT work

Like I said before, I understand and know what you are saying. No need to keep repeating.

I do NOT want to use the long, non-firendly URLs in Joomla articles, menus, etc especially if I have to update the links if I need to replace the external website/page with a new one. In this particular example, at some point in time. in the future, if we close the current campaign and change to a new one, I would have to go through every article and menu item to check and replace with the new URL. Using short links save a lot of time and effort especially for a volunteer. One ONE change needs to be made and that is inside YOURLs vs. many inside Joomla.

I'm closing this ticket.

it is NOTHING to do with YOURLS. A correct YOURLS link will work - we use yourls here at the joomla project. You do NOT have to change anything in your joomla site. Just fix your YOURLS and it will work exactly as you want it to

You can test this by using this link http://joom.la/gDW

that is a yourls generated shortlink