We’ve changed how URLs are generated and tracked in email blasts. Beginning April 8th, 2024, links to pages outside your domain generated before March 8th will no longer redirect to their designated destination. Instead, when a recipient clicks on one of these links, they will be taken to your homepage. Email blasts created from March 8th onward will be unaffected.
In short, only links from emails that are 30+ days old will be affected.
Why the change?
We changed the behavior of third-party links in emails because we discovered that our previous approach had a vulnerability that scammers could exploit to disguise bad URLs. We made a change to eliminate that vulnerability. Expiring older third-party links in email blasts is an additional precaution to ensure that no preexisting links can be used in this way.
More context
Links older than 30 days are not click-tracked in email blasts from NationBuilder, though they were still functional.
Outbound links to domains outside NationBuilder generated in emails before March 8th will not work after April 8th. They will redirect to your home page.
Links generated in emails after March 8th will work normally.
For example, if an email was sent before March 8 with the link example.org/special-campaign (with example.org being a website hosted outside of NationBuilder), anyone who clicks on that link after April 8 will be taken to example.org instead. If the email was saved or sent anytime after March 8, recipients will be taken to example.org/special-campaign as intended.
Please reach out if you would like any further clarification.