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Not a fan of the new redirect where it gives a message every time you visit a site outside of Gaia.

Personally, it just ruins my image map because all the links go to pages on Gaia. It just has to redirect through a PHP server. Thus making it somewhat ungraceful.

But in general, I think it disrupts the Gaia experience a bit too much for a fix to the Gaia scammers. Most scams are so easy to recognize and you just need to go by the principles of "The mods/admins will never ask for your password" and "Never user your username/password unless it's in the Gaia online domain." Unfortunately, it plays off of peoples desire to be special and famous on Gaia most of the time...as if joining some special group makes you famous.

It would be more work, but less disruptive if they changed the redirect code to check for known scam URLs and just prevented redirection to them. Sure it would have a lag time between catching the scam and adding it to the code leaving the space for a few people to get scammed still. However, dealing with scams seem to be part of the job of a moderator and not some code that probably can't fully stop scamming anyway. There will still be those that click through anyway. Meaning outright prevention of going to those URLs would actually work better.

EDIT: Appears they made a modification...where it goes to the page but displays a message above it about not entering your username/password. Much better. Haven't Q&Fed today but I'm pretty certain that it was filled with URL redirect suggestion/protests threads. I should perhaps suggest about the whole straight up blocking of known scam URLs.