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Comment by ereckers | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of what you would call a small developer and WordPress jobs are the majority of my business. I'm speaking only for myself here but when I see stuff like this I pass:

		RewriteEngine on
		RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^_escaped_fragment_=(.*)$
		RewriteRule (.*) http://crawlspa.com/s/%1 [P]

I understand what you're doing, but there's something about writing redirects to relatively new 3rd party sites that make me uncomfortable.

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I can appreciate that. Is there anything that would alleviate your concerns? It is something that should only affect crawlers and I'd expect most new users of the service to have zero Google presence (so better than nothing/worth a try?).

I can't see a better way of handling the integration.

Sorry about just getting back to you. I'm not sure if this is a better way of handling integration, but you could have it implemented via a plugin (this is WordPress specific).

This way you can abstract away the redirection and not ask the user to add it themselves (thus having them thinking about it). The install is then the "magic".

There's a danger that this can be seen as dishonest, but as long as it explicitly states what it is doing in the plugin description I think that's understandable.

I probably wouldn't mind the redirection if it was abstracted away with a plugin install, it's just the minute that I had to think about what I was doing by writing to my .htaccess file that I had reservations.

Weird explanation.. but that's my thoughts.

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