"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.