LJ is now attempting to skim affliliate income from its users.

[reddragdiva]

LiveJournal has outdone its own previous fuckery — it's now rewriting outgoing links to steal users' affiliate income for a huge list of sites — Amazon, eBay, etc.

You can switch this off for your own account, at least, per this post. It involves messing around with the admin console.

I can't see a way to explain this one as somehow accidental, an error in judgement or other plausibly innocent rationale. They've gone to some effort to do it in such a way (JavaScript fuckery) that people won't spot what's happening unless they're geeks and look really closely. It's as if they know this violates most affiliate schemes' terms of service.

I now post to DreamWidth, with a crosspost to LJ. I strongly recommend jumping ship. A paid account is US$3, or dw_codesharing has lotsa codes going spare. damned_colonial has a pile too. Comment here if you need one.

Update: "Whoops, we're sorry we got caught." It is still switched on as I write this, though. Update 2: It appears to have stopped. Update 3: Amazon are Not Amused.

Comments

[jld]

The official explanation seems to be that LJ took a piece of third-party JavaScript code which they manifestly did not understand and included it in every single LJ page, giving it the authority of livejournal.com.

I do not perceive any way in which this is good.

Also… even if I wanted to believe LJ was flat-out lying and knew exactly what they were doing, the “features” like turning a link to glutenfreebay.com into an eBay popup argue against it. On top of that, even if they didn't mean to steal from people using affiliate links, they basically admit to having intended to rake in money from non-affiliate links, without permission or even announcing the change.

So, the parts that are established as malice are *BAD*, the parts that are clearly incompetence are *BAD*, and the parts that aren't so clear are *BAD* in either case.