Hey Mark,

did this work for you? 
Would be happy to hear back.

In the meantime enjoy your weekend

Christoph

Hey Mark,

it is only 07:21 right now, but I updated my original answer.

Hope you still accept my premature answer

Christoph

Hey Mark,

I should not answer questions in around 6 a.m. Sorry for that

My example works only when you want to redirect from an old domain  to a new one - or from http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com

If you want the links to be on the same domain, things get tricky quite fast. I'll deep dive into the documentation and be right back

Hey Mark,

Finally a question that I can answer (yay!)

I use the following code on my website:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.it-engelhardt.de/$1 [R=301]</ifmodule>

It basically takes every URL like http://itengelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

and just redirects it (301 of course!) to http://www.it-engelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

UPDATE 1:  (after carefully re-reading the question)

OK, hopefully this is the correct answer to your question:

**Assumptions I made: **

• You want to extract the category name from the query string (i.e. everything after the '?')
• "ns=catshow" in the query string stands for "category show" and tells the server to show a category

Then this is hopefully what you want:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ns=catshow
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ref=([^&]+)
RewriteRule ^index.php /Category/%1? [R=301]

**What it does: **

1. checks if "ns=catshow" is present in the query string
2. extracts the value from the "ref=" variable in the query string and stores it in %1
3. rewrites every request to the server, that matches conditions 1. and 2. and starts with "index.php" to /Category/%1

4. the "?" at the end of "/Category/%1?" tells the server to throw away the original query string - this might not be desirable, if not: remove the '?'
5. the [R=301] tells the server to redirect using HTTP 301

Tested with: http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/

Thanks a lot.

I now set this up and it is showing some results.

However, can I see who shared my URL with FB Insights?

I am seeing a big spike in traffic coming from Facebook.

The referrer looks like this (at least sometimes, mostly it is just https://m.facebook.com or http://www.facebook.com/

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.terminretter.de%2F&h=rAQGSwECjAQGiZFaVEkz7U2od1RNFVtxhVQNG__EujSznUw&s=1

Is there a way to know who shared my URL on facebook?

Hey Mark,

I should not answer questions in around 6 a.m. Sorry for that

My example works only when you want to redirect from an old domain  to a new one - or from http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com

If you want the links to be on the same domain, things get tricky quite fast. I'll deep dive into the documentation and be right back