Being an impatient bastard, I almost always click on that. But exactly what’s it doing while I’m waiting if I do wait? What am I cutting it off from doing by clicking?
It’s collecting and sending all your important financial info to Nigeria.
But I already did that. Years ago. Multiple times.
Then you should be getting an E-mail soon.
If you wait, it’s basically counting.
Those redirect pages are basically told to redirect after a certain number of seconds have passed. Once the pre-determined amount of time passes, the redirect will occur.
If you don’t want to wait three seconds, or five, or ten, or whatever the allocated time period is, you simply click on the link and interrupt the clock.
That’s much more mundane than I was hoping it was. I thought maybe I was really sticking it to The Man by clicking on that.
To what end? Why does it count in other words.
Well, it counts because the person who wrote the page told it to count.
Redirects are usually done to send you to a different website, or to a new address for the same site. The reason that such pages usually wait, and give you a warning like the one referred to by the OP, is that people might be suspicious if they are immediately and automatically directed to a new web page.
If you have a blog, or something, and you change your blog address, there might still be people who come to the old address. You can set up that old site to redirect your visitors to your new site, but it is good etiquette to tell them that they are being redirected, and to explain why.
So, you might place something like this on your old page:
This tells your visitors what’s happening, and adding the ten-second delay gives them time to read your message and decide whether or not they want to visit your new site.
It says if the browser does not automatically redirect you. Does that ever not happen?
To make sure that you have time to read that it is redirecting you to another page. If the page loads fast enough it might otherwise just flash up the text and change to something else before you could read it.
Sometimes the wait helps ease server load if it’s redirecting to a different page on the same server. Slowing everyone down slows down the total number of server requests as well.
Yes, especially if you have your browser security settings set particularly high. Another common cause is that someone screwed up the redirect when they set up the page.
Quite a lot of sites fail to follow through. Instead of using regular HTML to do this trick, they’ve set up some unnecessarily complicated javascript that was originally written in 1998 before Firefox, Safari, or Chrome existed, let alone the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Opera, so may not work quite as reliably as it ought to.
I also get this message when sites have interstitial ads set up, where, because my ad-blocker doesn’t load them, the script doesn’t reach the expected point when the redirection is supposed to be triggered and just sits there waiting for something that isn’t coming.
SS, you’re my new best friend :D.
My browser’s set up to block redirects, so I have to click that link every time. Which probably explains why the Nigerians stopped offering me money.
…of course, if the Nigerians really saw my bank account balance, they’d probably sue me for wasting their time. :o
It’s also conceivable, though probably quite rare by now, that the user is using a web browser so ancient that it doesn’t have redirect capability. Though of course, when websites first started doing that, such browsers were still common, and web designers got into the habit of including that message.
How about for more nefarious reasons? I’m thinking of downloads - “your download will start in x”. For these, the “to give people time to read” and “to avoid arousing suspicions by an automatic redirect” reasons aren’t necessary. So to show more ads?
The thing is, it does it here at the SDMB when you sign in, which is doubtless what inspired the OP, and none of those reasons, except, perhaps, the last, seem to apply.
In my opinion, that is bad web design. Yes, a redirect page needs to exist for situations where the redirect fails. But you should never force the user to stay on that page for any length of time just to be sure they see the message. If you need to inform someone about the redirect (which is honestly quite rare), you should do it after landing on the new page, so there’s no delay. Making your page load longer, and then drawing attention to that fact is not a good idea. Noticeable delays make for a degraded user experience.
I would even consider hiding the entire redirect page, only unhinding it after a short delay. That way a normal user with JavaScript on will never see the page.
The answer for vBulletin was given earlier. It’s old software that was designed back when redirects failing was more common, connections and systems were slower, and not all browsers supported less intrusive ways to leave loading messages. I do not believe there is an intentional delay built in. The page exists to give you immediate feedback, while waiting for the log-in process to complete.
This is complete and utter bullshit. There are very good reasons for actually explaining a redirect to the end-user before it occurs, not least of which is that, in an environment where there are too many scam artists and malware producers, you let your user know that you are not doing anything untoward.
Even if a redirect is immediate, a user who is paying attention can still see it happening. If i click on johnsoldblog.com, and i see that the page redirects while loading, the first thing i’m likely to do is slap CTRL-W to close the tab. When i navigate to a page, i want to go to that page. If you’re going to redirect me somewhere else, i want to know about it first.
I’m sure you’re right that the OP was thinking about the SDMB. To be honest, i’ve always thought that the Dope’s log-in redirect page was sort of pointless, but if it’s there as a result of some antiquated vBulletin design, i wouldn’t be surprised.