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]

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.