Comments | poeticalpanther: PSA: A bit of useful info...

poeticalpanther

PSA: A bit of useful info...

Mar 04, 2010 19:12

... on something sneaky LJ's gotten up to in stealth redirect of your outbound links, and more importantly how to make it stop.

And please, any discussion we have of this, let us avoid the jokes about how the Russian LJ is this, and Russians are that, and Soviet LJ, and blah-di-blah, okay? Let's try for a bit to remember that there are a number of ( Read more... )

russian, psa

Comments 10

mylostmarbles March 5 2010, 00:56:18 UTC

If I had any idea what that actually meant (too much code geekery talk for me) I'm sure I'd be annoyed. A case of ignorance being bliss.

poeticalpanther March 5 2010, 02:02:25 UTC

Basically, it's a way to sneakily grab people's clicking behaviour to make money for LJ. What's annoying people about it is that anyone who had an affiliate deal with their outgoing links (say to Amazon or something) is no longer going to generate any revenue off it, because of the way the code-fiddling is being done.

And it was done without any announcement, and they've clearly tried hard to make it invisible to boot. It's just...uncultured, our Russian friends would say.

emily_goddess March 5 2010, 01:55:15 UTC

Stay classy, LJ.

poeticalpanther March 5 2010, 02:02:45 UTC

As ever. Rawr.

insaint March 5 2010, 01:57:25 UTC

Every link seems to be working okay for me, including the one in that post.

poeticalpanther March 5 2010, 02:00:34 UTC

Yeah, there was some discussion that it wasn't happening for some folk, but there hadn't been any conclusions drawn that I'd seen. I'd just be glad it wasn't happening, and not worry about it. I figured it isn't doing me any harm to do the console-set thing, so why not?

chezmax March 5 2010, 04:39:07 UTC

When I clicked that link, it was rewritten and briefly went through outboundlink.net. Yick.

greene_man March 5 2010, 20:13:42 UTC

Thanks for the headsup! I was getting an annoying advertisement every time I logged into LJ but now it is gone!

How can I ever thank you?

poeticalpanther March 5 2010, 20:54:58 UTC

Hmm. I'll have to think about that, see if I can come up with something. I know there are some terribly expensive games I have my eye on...;)

(The comment has been removed)

poeticalpanther March 5 2010, 20:54:05 UTC

There were a number of comments at the post I linked to using the tired "Soviet" jokes of whassisname, the "comedian". Yakov Smirnov, that's him. It seems since 6A bought LJ, every time LJ does some new bone-headed thing - cause hey, it's not like they've not been doing that for several years now - people end up making some really ignorant comments about Russians. Given that I have a number of Russian friends, some there and some here, I wanted to be sure it was clear that such "jokes" weren't really welcome here. :)