LJ outgoing link tampering...

[neotoma]

This is all kinds of nasty -- a script on LJ to redirect outbound links through a third party site which resulted in the substitution of the affiliate code on Amazon and order vendors.

Apparently, this script has been out for a month or two, and people are just now piecing together what happened because they've noticed things like complete fall-offs from their Amazon affiliate account from their book review journals and the like.

This is why I'm seriously putting most of my actual content on Dreamwidth -- DW hasn't pulled egregiously stupid shit yet. LJ does it at least once a year.

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Ha, I think I got it to work....

[neotoma]

Indeed, you did.

[annalee]

Looks like they're fixing it, and that they only *intended* to add affiliate codes to links that didn't have them so they could skim more money off of users (even paid ones).

Which, wow, makes me feel so much better about it, in that really not sort of way...