boosting the signal: LJ ecommerce URL rewriting FAIL
Here's a summary of what seems to have happened:
LJ hired a service called "Driving Revenue" that inserts javascript code into most of the LJ web pages in order to edit ecommerce URLs to add an LJ-specific affiliate link and get paid for the traffic that LJ drives to the ecommerce sites. HTTPS URLs seem to be unaffected.
Only the service they hired is also editing non-ecommerce URLs, is replacing existing affiliate codes as well as adding them to URLs that lack them entirely, and goes through a third-party server that had an outage recently.
LJ has announced they are dropping this third-party service.
Details here. Including a method of opting-out, although it also disables HitBox and possibly other LJ-inserted scripts. It's not clear to me how well this works, nor whether it works for logged-out users.
Do I really need to say how dumb this was? How bad it looks for LJ? Or how this is another way for LJ to lose its users trust, and with that, its users?
LJ hired a service called "Driving Revenue" that inserts javascript code into most of the LJ web pages in order to edit ecommerce URLs to add an LJ-specific affiliate link and get paid for the traffic that LJ drives to the ecommerce sites. HTTPS URLs seem to be unaffected.
Only the service they hired is also editing non-ecommerce URLs, is replacing existing affiliate codes as well as adding them to URLs that lack them entirely, and goes through a third-party server that had an outage recently.
LJ has announced they are dropping this third-party service.
Details here. Including a method of opting-out, although it also disables HitBox and possibly other LJ-inserted scripts. It's not clear to me how well this works, nor whether it works for logged-out users.
Do I really need to say how dumb this was? How bad it looks for LJ? Or how this is another way for LJ to lose its users trust, and with that, its users?