Flexmailer tries to apply tracking to anchor links, breaking them

[larssandergreen]

Since flexmailer applies tracking to anything like href='foo' or href="bar", it converts anchor links (of the form href="#foo") to tracked links, which of course breaks those links.

See here: https://github.com/civicrm/org.civicrm.flexmailer/blob/master/src/ClickTracker/HtmlClickTracker.php#L71 and here for text: https://github.com/civicrm/org.civicrm.flexmailer/blob/master/src/ClickTracker/TextClickTracker.php#L59

A simple solution would be simply to ignore any link of the form href="#foo" or href='#bar'. Not much of a change, but would be helpful (this is an issue that a few people have noticed with Mosaico). Does this approach make sense?

[sluc23]

facing same issue.. @totten any thought on how to fix this? I can work on a PR if you think that excluding non-absolute links from tracking makes sense (in case of #anchors, I think it does)

[sluc23]

@totten , I think I've found a worse bug related to this.. because the anchor (#myAnchor) link is tracked by Civi, the url is replaced in the email body like: <civi_url>/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=2&qid=1, when this is clicked in email client, Civi tracks the click and then replaces the url for <civi_url>/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=2&qid=1#myAnchor, which tracks again the click, and replaces it again.. getting into a redirection loop, stopped by the browser (after 20 times in my case with FF).

So the result of clicking a tracked "#" link is that the user cannot move into anchors inside same email body page, is redirected to Civi, followed by a browser error page because of the redirection loop, and Civi tracks this click 20 times (in my tests with Firefox)

I'll work on a PR to exclude anchor links from tracking.

[sluc23]

PR #51 submitted!

[totten]

51 was closed because it treated both internal and external anchors the same. Internal anchors should be untracked, but external anchors should still be tracked.

In the discussion of #51, I added some suggestions for an updated patch.