nacturation's Journal: Slashdot link weirdness solved: rogue link tracker

In the last week or two links to external sites on Slashdot generally don't seem to work unless I click several times. This only appears to happen on Firefox... Chrome is unaffected. I haven't tried IE, Safari, or any other browser. Finally fed up with it, I decided to look through the javascript to see if there was anything funky going on. Looks like there's a script being included from leads.demandbase.com that defines some kind of click tracker. Here's a snippet:

• else if(a[i].className.match(/clicky_log_outbound/i)){clicky.add_event(a[i],"mousedown",clicky.outbound);}else{clicky.add_event(a[i],"mousedown",clicky.click);

So if you find you've oddly had to click a few times to RTFA, it's not your mouse button dying. Open up adblock and disable everything from leads.demandbase.com and it will be fixed. Links clicked once in Firefox will properly load as they used to. Thanks Slashdot for using an external company for tracking my click behavior. Though perhaps implementing this poorly is Taco's way of giving us a heads-up. Much like the "Idle" section, his overlords may have mandated the addition of this awesomeness to the site and by making it break it alerts us to what we need to block. In which case, a non-sarcastic thanks is due.

I also found this wonderful gem:

• function pageload_done( $, console, maybe ){
          pageload.after_readycode = (new Date).getTime();
          pageload.content_ready_time = pageload.content_ready - pageload.before_content;
          pageload.script_ready_time = pageload.after_readycode - pageload.content_ready;
          pageload.ready_time = pageload.after_readycode - pageload.before_content; // Only report 1% of cases.
          maybe || (Math.random()>0.01) || $.ajax({ data: {
                  op: 'page_profile',
                  pagemark: pageload.pagemark,
                  dom: pageload.content_ready_time,
                  js: pageload.script_ready_time
          } });
  }

Unless my javascript is really rusty, won't this report 99% of cases?

Anyway, pass this information on so everyone can RTFA without the hassle.

External Links

[webmistressrachel]

It is interesting how URL shorteners have recently been used to escape troll moderations - my recent post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806114&cid=33781054 [slashdot.org] outlines the parent's strategy.

Re:

[nacturation]

I find bit.ly links amusing for the same reason. Especially when they're used on sites like Slashdot or other forums where there is no (practical) length limit to a post. "So you want me to click on some mystery link that is hosted on a Libyan domain? No thanks."

Of course, with bit.ly and goo.gl you can append a + on the end of the URL to see where it links to (eg: http://bit.ly/troll+ [bit.ly]), but I prefer to simply ignore them. On another occasion some AC replied to one of my posts with a pastehtml.com link.

Thanks

[tqft]

I use Thunderbird as an rss reader and get /. that way.

Was wondering why sometimes the links do not work - tb does not really do js. Having to manually copy and paste the links stops me wasting so much time.

Re:

[nacturation]

I use Thunderbird as an rss reader and get /. that way.

Was wondering why sometimes the links do not work - tb does not really do js. Having to manually copy and paste the links stops me wasting so much time.

Sounds like a Thunderbird issue. The links from http://slashdot.org/index.pl?content_type=rss [slashdot.org] are clean without any extra javascript or cruft.