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

[reddragdiva]

Also, lots of people notified Amazon that LJ were doing this.

[vayshti.livejournal.com]

It definitely does read like either a 'whoops we got busted' or a 'we're so freaking incompetent'.

The conversation in the link is worth looking at in detail.

It'll be interesting to see how they deal with compensation for lost revenue...

[reddragdiva]

Yes. I note that it's STILL SWITCHED ON after the "sorry."