

LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links - daleharvey
http://vichan.livejournal.com/392527.html

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swombat
Stripping affiliate links from freely hosted blogs = dubious, but just about
defensible

Stripping affiliate links from freely hosted blogs AND replacing them with
your own links = unacceptably sleazy

Stripping affiliate links from paid blogs and replacing them with your own
links = outright offensive? Extra serving of fail?

What's next? Inserting porn ads into people's blogs?

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barrkel
It's even worse - not only is it stripping links, it's often actually
_breaking_ them. The www.glutenfreebay.com example actually should redirect to
glutenfreebay.blogspot.com, but instead it's heading to ebay.com.

~~~
zaatar
It's actually any domain with the word "bay" that redirects to ebay.com:
<http://www.crittersbythebay.com> for example.

~~~
djcapelis
Uhm, you're aware that link has "ebay.com" as the last 8 characters of the
domain, right?

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mbreese
What does that have to do with it? If I put to a link to
"ifreakinghateebay.com" would it be okay if they rediected it to ebay? No, of
course not.

~~~
djcapelis
Oh, it's clearly broken, it's just the comment I was replying to asserted that
anything with the word bay in it triggers the breakage. This seems to be
unlikely. The fact that the behavior was broken and links unrelated to ebay
were being redirected to ebay was already well established by that point in
the thread.

Understanding which links are affected by this issue and the scope of the
problem might be relevant.

In fact, one might go ahead and leap to the conclusion based on our revised
understanding (that it does in-fact likely need ebay.com in the url to
trigger) that this error is being caused by an unfortunately constructed
regular expression or overaggressive pattern match and one might even learn
something.

But far be it from me to assume that such a far fetched conjecture has
anything to do with it.

~~~
dandelany

      !!"eBay.com".match(/ebay.com/i); //true
      !!"CrittersByTheBay.com".match(/ebay.com/i); //true
      !!"ThePirateBay.com".match(/ebay.com/i); //true

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mixmax
It's interesting to note that the sites that are most successful in the long
run are the ones that take the higher ground and employ some basic ethics and
decency - and actually live by it. This is a perfect example of a sleazy
practice that, while it might make them some petty cash in the short run, will
end up costing more in bad press and fleeing customers than the gained
revenue.

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mumrah
I will always remember LiveJournal as the reason for Memcache being invented.
It's funny how you can be nostalgic about a key-value system...

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Willie_Dynamite
They've disabled it.
[http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=106017...](http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1060179)

~~~
bbatsell
They've _claimed_ to disable it, but it's still active. (Just click the
"glutenfreebay" link in the OP.)

~~~
Willie_Dynamite
I did before I posted the link, and I didn't get redirected to eBay.

~~~
pyre
That link is currently still redirecting me to ebay.com.

~~~
Willie_Dynamite
I don't have a lj account and I'm not ebayed. Both Chrome and FF steadfastly
refuses to steal my click.

~~~
pyre
Could have been a caching issue. The link is no longer broken for me.

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jonknee
<http://drivingrevenue.com/> was the firm running the redirector... Looks
shady as hell.

~~~
ramchip
_Driving Revenue is full service affiliate marketing solution comprised of
online marketers, developers and analysts. Our mission is to equip site owners
with a variety of powerful and innovative tools designed to maximize their
online ventures. We use cutting-edge solutions that provide a compressive and
customized approach to your Internet environment. In short: we help you
monetize your existing traffic._

Well, it sounds like they leverage core skillsets and world-class team synergy
to provide clients worldwide with robust, scalable, modern turnkey
implementations of flexible, personalized, cutting-edge Internet-enabled
e-business application product suite e-solution architectures that accelerate
response to customer and real-world market demands and reliably adapt to
evolving technology needs, seamlessly and efficiently integrating and
synchronizing with their existing legacy infrastructure, enhancing the
e-readiness capabilities of their e-commerce production environments across
the enterprise while giving them a critical competitive advantage and taking
them to the next level.

Joke aside I do seriously wonder how they came up with the "compressive and
customized approach to your Internet environment"...

~~~
ktsmith
Someone seriously misspelled comprehensive and when they ran it through spell
check it came out with compressive.

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invisible
It may very well be malicious, but it really sounds like someone made a
boneheaded mistake. It was not suppose to "strip" affiliate links. I believe
that - I really do.

The intended purpose was to add affiliate links to links that do not have
affiliate codes attached. I would totally do that if I ran LiveJournal and it
makes perfect sense.

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dotBen
Ok serious question...

What do people feel about url shorteners doing this? Also, what about free
twitter clients - as a mechanism for monetization?

~~~
pyre
If you read the whole thing (links and all) you'll find this nugget of a
comment:

    
    
      Ooh, wait, I can do one better: I'm telling Amazon. (Anybody with me? A
      plurality of e-mail speaks louder than one.) This is in strict violation of
      the Operation Agreement for the Associate program, which forbids attempts to
      hide links, links being processed through redirects, failure to disclose use
      of the Affiliate program, and tampering with other Affiliate links without
      disclosure.
    

I'm sure there are plenty of similar clauses in the affliate programs from
other e-commerce sites (and if there aren't it's an oversight for sure).

Assuming that you're asking about stripping affilate ids and replacing them
with your own, then that's a shady, shady business and I wouldn't touch any VC
with a ten-foot pole that would fund you that idea. How would you even propose
to grow such a business seeing as you're in clear violation of the terms of
the programs you would be relying on for revenue? It would be like proposing a
startup where you hire ex-cons to mug people nightly in parks nationwide for a
cut of their 'earnings.' Would you really think that such an idea had any
thought put towards the future of the business?

If you're talking about pattern-matching URLs and redirecting to the wrong
site (e.g. DownByTheBay.com -> eBay.com), then that kind of breaks the idea of
a URL shortener. The shortened URL is supposed to take you to the location of
the full URL.

~~~
jrockway
What is Amazon going to do about a Russian company?

~~~
mbrubeck
Cancel their affiliate account and refuse to pay any earnings from their
referrals?

~~~
jrockway
Ah, I didn't know they were redirecting anyone to Amazon. I thought the
blogger's referral codes were being removed from links.

~~~
mbrubeck
Yeah, they were removing bloggers' referral codes from Amazon links and
substituting their own.

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mseebach
This has the taste of a troll, but I mean it as a sincere question: Why are
people still on LiveJournal? I get that they more-or-less invented the blog as
we know it, but what do they bring to table today? Doesn't pretty much any
other free blog service offer a superior experience?

~~~
allenbrunson
livejournal really isn't in the same category as blogs. it's got a much
greater community aspect. you have a friends list, and you can make entries
that only people on your friends list can see. lj has threaded comments that
actually work, which is untrue of most of the rest of the blogosphere. there
are standalone lj communities, which blogging platforms don't have. and so on.

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jasonwilk
Blackhat Tactics FTW!!!!

