Linkjet

Changelog

1.5.4

• Security: a regular-expression redirect whose target starts with a placeholder (for example /$1) can no longer send visitors to a foreign site. Linkjet checks the target after the placeholders are filled in, the way a browser reads it (backslashes, encoded slashes and a scheme without // included), and only allows the host the rule itself names; before, the request /go//evil.com produced the target //evil.com. Targets such as http:$1 or https:/$1, where a placeholder would decide the host, are refused when the rule is saved.
• Security: with parameter forwarding switched on, incoming query parameters no longer overwrite parameters that are already part of the target URL, so a visitor cannot replace your affiliate ID by appending ?tag=….
• Security: settings and the “replace everything” backup import now require an administrator. Editors with Linkjet access still manage links and can import backups in merge mode, but such an import no longer changes settings.
• Security: the language setting is checked against the list of available languages before a translation file is loaded, and settings from a backup import are cleaned key by key.
• Security: the CSV export prefixes cells that start with =, +, - or @, so spreadsheet programs do not run them as formulas. Linkjet’s own CSV import removes the prefix again.
• Privacy: the click log no longer stores IP addresses or user agents. Click counts, time, device, browser, country and referrer statistics work as before. Rows recorded before this update are not changed. The IP anonymisation setting was removed because there is nothing left to anonymise.
• Fix: target URLs with percent-encoding (for example %20 or %C3%A4) were damaged when a link was saved in the admin form. They are stored unchanged again, as they already were through the REST API.
• Fix: request paths and query strings are decoded before they are cleaned. Redirects for addresses with umlauts such as /%C3%9Cber-uns match again, regular-expression redirects also match paths with spaces, and forwarded parameters keep their values (kaffee%20maschine no longer turns into kaffeemaschine).
• Fix: slugs may contain dots and letters with accents or umlauts, so 404 entries such as llms.txt, old-page.html or Über-uns become working redirects. If a 404 path still cannot be matched, or belongs to WordPress itself, turning it into a redirect is refused with a message and the entry stays open, instead of creating a rule that never fires.
• Fix: WordPress loopback and cron requests, requests that identify themselves with your own site address, and common HTTP libraries (python-requests, Go-http-client, okhttp) are no longer counted as clicks.
• Fix: on installations in a subdirectory such as /shop, a path like /shopping-guide is no longer shortened to ping-guide.
• Fix: the admin form no longer damages the short URL. A pasted percent-encoded path such as %C3%9Cber-uns is stored as Über-uns, and regex patterns keep named groups such as (?<id>…).
• Fix: exact slugs can no longer cover addresses that WordPress serves itself, such as wp-sitemap.xml, wp-comments-post.php, wp-signup.php or xmlrpc.php. Saving such a slug is refused with a message.

1.5.3

• Change: translations are no longer shipped inside the plugin. They come from translate.wordpress.org, where anyone can contribute and WordPress installs them automatically.
• Change: every table name now goes through the %i identifier placeholder of wpdb::prepare(), so no query builds its own SQL from an interpolated name. Because %i needs WordPress 6.2, that is the new minimum version.
• Change: the bundled translation loader now handles all translation loading on its own; the redundant load_plugin_textdomain() call was removed. Behaviour is unchanged, including the language override setting.
• Fix: four strings with placeholders now carry a translators comment, so translators can see what the placeholder stands for.
• Change: input is sanitised at the point of entry as well, not only in the data layer. No behavioural change; the data layer already cleaned every value.
• Change: database queries, view templates and view filters now carry the reasoning for the coding-standard exceptions they need, so reviewers and contributors can see why they are there.

1.5.1

• Change: English is now the source language of all interface strings. German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch were bundled with that release; as of 1.5.3 translations come from translate.wordpress.org instead. The language setting keeps working as before.
• Change: tested up to WordPress 7.1.

1.5.0

• New: regular-expression redirects. Patterns are validated when you save (an invalid pattern is refused instead of silently never matching) and can be tested against a sample path right in the editor. Back-references $1–$9 are available in the target URL.
• New: conflict guard. Before saving, Linkjet warns you if a redirect would shadow an existing page, overlap another rule, or affect critical paths such as checkout, login or the REST API. Redirect loops are refused outright.
• New: the 404 monitor separates real broken links from bot traffic and vulnerability-scanner probes (wp-config, phpmyadmin, cgi-bin and friends). The badge counts real 404s only, noise has its own tab, and a configurable row limit rotates the log automatically so it cannot grow forever.
• New: the import wizard understands the Pretty Links 4.0 data model, including installations left half-migrated by that upgrade. Columns are detected instead of assumed, and entries without a target URL are reported rather than dropped silently.
• New: REST endpoint POST /links/test-pattern and a noise filter on GET /404s; both are documented in the OpenAPI manifest.
• Fix: the language setting works again. Since WordPress 6.5 loads bundled translation files by itself, the plugin’s own language override was silently ignored – picking e.g. French on an English site kept showing English. An explicitly chosen language now takes precedence.
• Fix: the conflict guard’s warnings and several other new texts were only available in German; all six languages are complete again.
• Fix: two placeholder texts in the admin UI were hard-coded in German and stayed German in every language.

1.4.2

• Fix: bulk-deleting links now fires linkjet_link_deleted for each link so add-ons can clean up their data (previously only single deletes did).
• New: linkjet_links_purged action fires when a backup import replaces all links – add-ons must clear link-related data there because link IDs are reused after the reset.

1.4.1

• Fix: the per-link nofollow setting is now also applied to the redirect itself via an X-Robots-Tag: nofollow response header – previously it only affected shortcode/block HTML, so search engines still followed cloaked affiliate redirects. Links with nofollow disabled stay dofollow (no header). New filter linkjet_redirect_robots to customise the directives (e.g. add noindex).

1.4.0

• New: developer hooks and filters so add-ons can extend Linkjet cleanly (linkjet_before_redirect, linkjet_redirect_target, linkjet_click_logged, linkjet_link_created/_updated/_deleted, linkjet_admin_menu, linkjet_admin_tabs, linkjet_link_edit_fields, linkjet_after_save_link, linkjet_settings_fields, linkjet_after_save_settings, linkjet_link_row_actions, linkjet_rest_prepare_link). See HOOKS.md.

1.3.1

• New: case-insensitive redirect fallback – redirects now also catch differently-cased URLs (e.g. /Programm and /PROGRAMM), but only when the URL would otherwise return a 404, so real pages are never hijacked.
• Change: removed promotional wording from the plugin name/description and assets.

1.3.0

• New: dedicated manage_linkjet capability – administrators always keep access; editors can optionally be granted access without full admin rights.

1.2.1

• Fix: slugs now preserve upper/lower case (e.g. /Programm); exact redirect matching is case-sensitive so an existing lower-case page is not hijacked.

1.2.0

• New: 404 monitor – logs dead URLs and turns them into redirects, with REST support for AI-assisted maintenance.
• New: REST endpoints for settings (/settings) and a machine-readable API manifest (/openapi).
• Fix: reliable UI translation loading, independent of the WordPress translation-file parser.

1.1.0

• New: performance cache for the redirect engine (slug index, avoids DB queries on non-matches).
• New: GDPR auto-cleanup – click logs are deleted automatically after X days via WP-Cron.
• New: device, browser and country statistics (country only from server/CDN headers, no external GeoIP DB).
• New: bulk actions in the link list (activate, deactivate, delete, assign category).
• New: slug collision warning when saving.
• New: QR code per link, generated locally (optional drop-in library, no external calls).
• New: Gutenberg block “Linkjet link”.
• New: import wizard for Pretty Links and Redirection (incl. click statistics).
• New: full JSON backup (admin + REST /export & /import).
• New: multilingual UI (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch) + language override.
• Security: protection against PHP object injection in the Redirection importer.

1.0.0

• Initial release.