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]

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.