LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links | Hacker News Reader

LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links

vichan.livejournal.com

83 pointsdaleharvey41 comments

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

They've disabled it. http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=106017...

"The issues you describe were caused by some new LiveJournal code which produced these unexpected effects."

I'm not sure how any of that could really and truthfully be "unexpected."

It was the backlash that was "unexpected". As usual.

When will companies learn to stop lying to their users and just issue real apologies?

When an apology that admits you made a mistake cannot be used as evidence against you in a lawsuit.

It could be that they intended to redirect ebay.com links and a mistake ended up redirecting everything with ebay.com in it?

From what I've read that seems a possibility.

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

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

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

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

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

Are you logged into LJ? Try logging out and clicking again.

You are correct. I got redirected to ebay.

Judging by some of the comments there, it was all done in Javascript. So whether it still happens to you or not, might be caused by whether you have that Javascript file in your browser cache.

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

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"...

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

Heh, I know this company. What a godawful way to say 'we provide software that inserts affiliate links into vBulletin installs so your forum can make a bit more money', which is what they actually do.

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.

Ok serious question...

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

Shady. Shady.

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.

What is Amazon going to do about a Russian company?

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

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

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

It's unclear who that affiliate account is owned by. For all we know, that other company could just be providing the tools for LiveJournal to insert their own affiliate id.

Isn't this what StackOverflow does? I remember reading some chatter about them replacing users amazon affiliate tags with their own.

Amazon links on that site get changed to point to rads.stackoverflow.com which sounds like it violates the TOS.

I only ask because I've been slowly puttering around the idea of creating a little website as a side project, and I was considering "borrowing" this idea from them (though I was going to preserve affiliate ids from users, if they were entered).

It's fine if you communicate it up front. I'd make sure this was somewhere in a nice big font on sign-up:

"You're using a free service, and we need to make money, so we modify certain links to e-commerce sites. When people click on those links and then buy something, we get a small percentage. This doesn't affect the content of the linked sites at all - the experience will be identical. It does mean you'll be unable to make money on your own by linking to e-commerce sites and using an affiliate code. Sorry - but this is a free service."

In fact, removing affiliate links almost certainly has a beneficial effect - your service is less likely to be seen as a tool for direct marketing lowlifes.

A lot of things that seem shady when done on the sly and hidden from users are fine when explained up front and in clear and simple English.

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?

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.

Blackhat Tactics FTW!!!!

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