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

[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.

[dstroy]

It's a very strange one. Some folks are seeing this and others cannot seem to get it to happen. I couldnt see the outbound thing on "working"links unless I right-clicked and copied the link URL and then pasted it to something else, or clicked the link... and then I started noticing that it would also look mangled in the status bar of my Firefox. (It appeared to look "normal" before the copy/pasting or clicking of the link too) and yet others cant get that to happen at all.
I'm in Firefox, permanent user, on a mac, btw. So it's not just an iE thing...

One gal had an interesting theory that it may have something to do with that "allow LJ to track usage" opt-out thing that was sent around like...4 or 5 years ago?... but now none of us can seem to find where that option was hidden to see if the folks *not* seeing these effects were on the opt-out list, or vice versa. I'm not a code guru by any stretch of the imagination, but if you're interested, there's further discussion going on over here: (where I posted when I first started

[growf]

Cheers for that - didn't mind it right up until nerfcoyote's link down there showed it was implemented by morons. Nixed.