Let's say an external site has a redirection page before actually moving to the internal site when user clicks the link. This internal site only has a button that will let you go back using History.back() or .go(-x). I can only do changes on the internal site.
What's happening here is that we now have a "loop" that redirects to the external redirection page using history.back(), and then the user will be redirected once again to the internal site.
Flow:
External site -> user clicks on internal site link -> external site sends user to external redirection page -> user redirects to visit the internal site -> user click history.back button -> user get redirected to external redirection page -> user redirects to visit the internal site again
I basically do not want the user to end up at the internal site after users clicks the history.back button.
I thought about saving page visit in localstorage, so that if it gets redirected back to the internal site again it will instead do history.go(-2). I am also aware of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/referrer document.referrer, but that will also degrade the UX since the user gets redirected back and forth at least once.
The only solution I could think of is having a query parameter upon visiting the internal site someurl.com/?redirects=2, so that we could do history.go(-redirects). However, that requires the external site to decide how many redirects it has.
Is it possible to know if user comes from a redirection page from the external site? Is there a way so that we can skip the external redirection page and just go straight to the external page?
window.location.replace is there for exactly the same requirement, please refer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/replace
Assuming that the external rediection page contains only the logic for rediection and no content, they should have used location.replace for redirection to have a clean state of history.
I know that you do not have control over external site but I just wanted to help in case you can ask someone to make changes there :)