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Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the headline has been fixed. Gotta love HN. It used to be: "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", now it's "Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links". (I'll have to point out though that this is not a major point in TFA, I didn't even see that mentioned in there.)

Yup, that's right. This is the URL fixing functionality only implemented in ABP for Firefox. If you type amazorn.com, Adblock Plus will correct it for you (if you activated this feature, it's opt-in), sending you to amazon.com.

ABP does indeed add an affiliate ID to those links, it was a monetisation idea. We've been open about this [1] (See "Monetization"), nobody's being tracked and nobody's seeing any extra ads.

I had and have some doubts about this making sense as a part of ABP, but I wouldn't consider it shady.

[1] http://adblockplus.org/blog/typo-correction-feature-in-adblo...

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There are some things you could improve about typo correction to make it consistent with how you handle ad-blocking rules:

* Update the rules over HTTPS, not HTTP

* Filter preferences should show the typo-correction-rule URL, just as it does for ad-blocking rules, and it should be possible to inspect them by clicking

* typo correction should probably only be used if the target website doesn't actually exist. See elsewhere in the comments, that is what how one would normally expect it to work.

As it is now the fact that typo correction even uses an insecure, remote list of rules is not at all obvious from the UI, instead its hidden away in the code.

Of course its also a bit confusing on why typo correction is even part of AdBlock Plus to begin with, as there is another extension just for that purpose - urlfixer. If someone wants typo correction you could suggest them to also install urlfixer, but it doesn't really make sense to have two unrelated features in one extension. Don't try to become an extension that does everything...

Frankly, I have no idea why it's not being served over HTTP (there must be a technical reason, Wladimir is a HTTPS zealot), and I'm not sure why the corrections URL is not configurable. I bet we discussed that in the blog or the forum, but unfortunately the site's down right now :(

As for correcting URLs that do exist, I think the idea was to avoid phishing sites and parking sites. But IIRC we did have a considerable number of false positives, so it's a questionable approach.

I'll argue for removing it from ABP now. URL Fixer is from us as well (it's the same code we have in ABP), so anyone who liked it can just install that. I'd rather have ABP do one thing, and do it well, feature creep is a thing...

Edit: It's decided, we'll remove the feature.

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