When links have been submitted to my site, and then go live, when you hover over the site url it shows mysite(example)/out.php?ID=1(or)2(whatever).
Why won't it just show the url of the site in question? Will this then not put people off from submitting links? The way it is now will they be seen as backlinks?

out.php is used to keep a count of the outbound clicks, it then does a 301 redirect to the target site, and is considered as a back link by search engines such as Google.

Someone once posted a java script routine that allowed the outbound click to be counted, and show a plain URL, but that was in a previous version of this forum where the database got corrupted. I'll see if I can dig it out of my backups.

Thanks very much indeed

Hi
Did you manage to find this?
I'm getting a lot of comments such as this:

"It's also the "old" way of working. There are cleaner ways of working... read up and keep up. Don't use redirects." (this in response to me answering the below comment by explaining what you told me about the out.php in below posts)

or

"redirect is bad"

Well sorry, but I can not find the javascript snippet someone once submitted, and I don't write javascript myself, but for someone that does, this would be a pretty quick couple lines of code to write. If you'd care to make a small donation via the Paypal button to the right, I can probably hire a javascript programmer to write what you need, and add the feature to the current version, in essence you would sponsor the feature.

The other option is to edit the draw_sites function in the includes/function.php file to make it show a plain URL, but since outbound clicks would not be counted, you would also need to remove the "Whats Popular" links from the menus.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to offend you in any way. I was just passing on what some of the people were saying that were submitting to my directory. Am sending you message right now. Please check.