LJ erroneously hijacks affiliate links?

[charmian]

It appears that LJ added in some code which redirected links to certain e-commerce domains to other domains (although this script seems to have stopped?) (This company seems to be the one involved. Possibly this program? Also mentioned here. And explained by a user of the program here. )

http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/87066.html
http://atara.livejournal.com/631445.html
http://vichan.livejournal.com/392527.html

Not being a coder or familiar with affiliate marketing, I don't really understand the technical aspects of it, but it's not really clear what LJ really meant to do. Does anyone know what the actual intention of this code probably was? And if so, how could they muck it up so much?

It seems that, whatever the intention of this code was, that it may have caused LJ users to lose money.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

I totally agree on the lack of testing. This thing has been running live on the site for over a month, there's no reason somebody shouldn't have tested it and found out it wasn't working and stopped using it until it did.

I think they're ditching Driving Revenue, because the company's no good at staying in contact or fixing problems they've been having. But I wouldn't be surprised if they found another way to monetize affiliate links--it's really nice, tasty, low hanging fruit.

[charmian]

Yeah, it sounds like people even contacted them with similar complaints before, so why didn't they do something then?

Oh, have you heard that they hadn't been in contact?

I wonder if then they'll start to actively have a policy on it, then. IIRC there is currently no policy on affiliate links.

[foxfirefey]

The right people weren't complaining. I don't mean that as badly as it sounds, but, basically--LJ Support is swamped and overworked. LJ Management probably did not communicate much about these technical changes to LJ Support, so they muddle through the best they can, which is why those Support Requests complaining about it have been open for weeks. To make matters worse, affiliate link hijacking is often a malware technique, so it's difficult at first to discern something that is the fault of the site from something that is the fault of malware, further delaying the requests.

[charmian]

So who are the 'right people?' I mean, it's difficult to spin that phrase positively.

If it simply is that LJ Support is swamped, it wouldn't have mattered who complained, right? (Huh, so the situation didn't improve? I remember Mark made a post about the situation last year or something, but since then I hadn't heard of anything, so I assumed things had improved).

So what does it take for LJ to do something? Someone to investigate the situation and complain on the news comm?

But this thing should have been easily replicable, shouldn't it? I mean, the way the links were, anyone would have been redirected, unlike malware (and anyway, it seems that 'the fault of the site' and 'malware' are not always mutually exclusive...)

[foxfirefey]

The right people are those who either:

* Know people directly in Support/whatnot, and talk to them about it, and they all go off and do investigation and find stuff, and then it gets passed up the chain.

or

* Have the ability to sleuth something to the root of the cause (or at least a perceived root), write up an articulate post about it, and spread the word, complain on the news, etc. Then Support/staff end up seeing it, and it goes up the chain. Sometimes being able to accurately describe the problem in an inflammatory or clear way works, too, and no root cause is needed.

Now, this isn't always the case by any means--if an issue is obvious or easily recognized as something outside the usual pattern or related to something that was talked about in a code push, Support will definitely catch on a lot faster!

But if the issue is something fewer people are going to complain about, especially if it's similar to things malware writers do, it's hard to figure out the root of it. That's what this was. I saw a report about the affiliate link getting changed weeks ago, and that was the stock answer given (also in part because it originally came in in Italian I imagine).

I don't know if Support is as bad as it was then, but it's certainly no walk in the park even if it's better than absolute rock bottom, and they keep losing category admins to busy life schedules, etc.

[charmian]

Ah, so to get your problems taken seriously nowadays, you need connections or writing ability/computer knowledge? I think this situation will only encourage people to start raising hell in the news comm, though.

Oh, that it was malware? (the stock answer)

Well, I guess they really can't do anything about that, except hiring staff to help out. It makes me wonder how companies that do use 100% hired staff deal with the issue. (Unless the workload has gotten much worse than it was in the past?)

[foxfirefey]

More that you're not going to get a quick resolution if you can't do those things. I don't blame Support, though--LJ should be notifying Support of technical changes to the site like this in a coordinated fashion, and I am getting the impression that did not happen. (LJ should also have been TESTING to make sure things were functionally to begin with shortly after it went like, but eh, I guess that didn't happen either.)

So of course the Support people wouldn't have known to look out for possible funky things happening to affiliate links. That puts any mysterious affiliate yoinkage happening into the realm of Mysterious Glitches, and those are a lot more work to track down and figure out, and since Support is overworked, there is not a lot of time to do that. And, well, affiliate links being wrong is kind of...not the highest user support priority? I mean, I think trying to figure out other technical glitches that are affecting people's use of the site probably attracts more effort. If not a lot of people are reporting it (and I don't think there were--else it would have come out a lot sooner), then it's harder to bump it up the priority list.

[charmian]

I kind of wonder what's going to happen if people start figuring that out, though and start going straight to News.

The whole testing thing seems really ridiculous. To have the links not even going to the right place... Totally defeats the whole "secret" nature of the program. Probably no one would have figured it out for awhile if it weren't for that.

I suppose not too many people really use/care about affiliate links, but I'm surprised that more people didn't notice links being borked, so perhaps there were other technical things that triggered the problem.

[foxfirefey]

Another thing that's been pointed out that has to do with the Support thing that made it NOT so easy to diagnose is that this affiliate script was connected with a little known opt-out for stats that Support people may have had set. In that case, somebody would have been reporting an issue and the Support volunteer may not have been able to replicate it, because they were logged in. And when you're doing tech support, if things look and talk like a goose when they walk in, it's hard to psychically know that it's actually a really big duck.