What is LJ doing to my links?

[shatterstripes]

Edit, the next day: LJ has said that the code doing this affiliate link fuzzling has been displaying "several unintended behaviors" and they're in the process of pulling it. So if you get nothing now, this is probably why. They've still lost a lot of what little trust I still had in them for doing this so stealthily in the first place.Lately I've

Comments

Re: Found googling "outboundlink dRev.js"

[shatterstripes]

If I had an affiliate link to anywhere I'd try to post it and see what outboundlink.net does to it…

I also wonder at the "Is this a real ID or will we be asked to change it?" comment. Could be that they're not doing anything yet because it's still being set up.

[rax]

I'm blocking this "dRev" script, myself.

Would you be willing to share how you're doing this?

[shatterstripes]

I'm already using GlimmerBlocker to kill ads. I went to the 'filters' pane of its prefs and added a new rule in the 'My filters' list: block, host is "l-stat.livejournal.com", path is "/js/pagestats/dRev.js".

For Macs using other ad-blockers, or other systems, do whatever's appropriate to block either ""l-stat.livejournal.com/js/pagestats/dRev.js" to nuke it just on LJ, or, presumably, "dRev.js" to nuke it everywhere.

[dstroy]

Thank you!! I was trying to figure out why all the links on my friends page were timing out in this outboundlink business and what it was and stumbled across this post. (It comes up when you search for outboundlink.net and LJ in Google)

I am on a Mac and just wanted you to know that when I added that line to my AdBlock Plus tool of my browser, the problem completely disappeared. I was starting to worry that my computer had gotten some sort of malware on it since I could no longer right-click to copy paste URL links without getting that messed up wrapped-link in the results, and the problem only became apparent to me when the redirect site was being slow or garbling links past the point of working. And of course, the problems seeming to be random/intermittent, other folks didnt notice the wrapper at all. Wonder how long it's been there - I only noticed yesterday when links were getting broken!

[shatterstripes]

I think I first noticed it a couple weeks ago when someone linked to the Amazon page for one of their books. The date on post I found asking about it is February 6.

None of the official LJ code release notices (which I watch because I am a dork!) for the year to date mention anything like this, so who knows when it started? I'm assuming sometime this year.

[pen_umbra]

Dreamwidth sounds more appealing by the day!

Re: Wordpress

[pen_umbra]

That would be annoying! I haven't ever used Google Reader, though it's good to know that's an issue if I ever decide to in the future. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: Wordpress

[foxfirefey]

Google Reader, as far as I know, expects all feeds to be public and does not support ?auth=digest, so neither LJ or DW friends-locked posts should show up in it.

[yippee]

ugh yeah... i'd noticed this when someone linked to http://www.crittersbythebay.com which redirected to eBay via "outboundlink". Thanks for the heads up...

[shatterstripes]

*checks* Oooh, awesome. The outboundlink back-end is stupid and breaks links, too! Yeah, this needs to diiiieeeee.

[ultraken]

Wow, that seriously blows. :|