[Feature request] Remove complex links (post-processing on final HTML)

[jeffw16]

Crawler bots typically work by finding links and putting that on their processing queue. A great way to minimize that is by removing these complex links from even being displayed to anonymous users. An example is the diffs link on the ?action=history page.

From: @cookmeplox

[jeffw16]

Here seems to be a good approach to take:

$wgHooks['HtmlPageLinkRendererBegin'][] = function ( 
    $linkRenderer, $target, &$text, &$extraAttribs, &$query, &$ret 
) {
    // 1. Only run this logic if the user is viewing a "history" page
    $action = RequestContext::getMain()->getActionName();
    
    if ( $action === 'history' ) {
        // 2. Identify the timestamp link. 
        // MediaWiki assigns the 'mw-changeslist-date' class to these specifically.
        if ( isset( $extraAttribs['class'] ) && 
             strpos( $extraAttribs['class'], 'mw-changeslist-date' ) !== false ) {
            
            // 3. Set the 'return' value to just the plain text (the date string)
            $ret = $text;
            
            // 4. Return false to tell MediaWiki "Don't bother making a link, I've handled it"
            return false; 
        }
    }
    return true;
};