Apparent problem with affiliate links
 

whats the deal with links becoming "affiliate" links with a bunch of code or something auto added.

for example...

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/9087531-post601.html

in that post there is 2 links to DD and the links don't work for me and even when i try to edit out all the extra stuff it just goes right back in there.

even the link at the very top of this
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/dvd-bargain...8-edition.html
gets all the stuff and doesn't work when i click it.

[I'll move this to its own thread because I'm not quite sure that it constitutes FAQ material].

There was some some automation of links to affiliates while (site founder) Geoff still owned the place and I can only presume that further work has been done in this regard by the current owners.

That said, I will certainly pass on to IB your observations that things don't seem to be functioning as intended.

They work for me. That's just the way they work for DeepDiscount. Sometimes the forum messes up the link if the post gets edited. It will sometimes insert the affiliate stuff a second time, making the link totally fubar, but those links work for me. You may have affiliate links blocked due to cookie-tracking type stuff. There's been no change with how affiliate links work on the forum either.

they crash my explorer with a vis c++ error

thanks!

Clicking on the link in the DDD sale mentioned loads DDD, but extremely slowly.

I was going to complain about that. Even if the resulting links work, recursively applying the affiliate link filter is ridiculous and trivial to fix.

still, whenever i click on a link that has been affiliated, i get a nearly blank
page with the word "loading...".
i have to click on that word to get to the actual
page in the original link.

That's exactly what I get also. It's been happening a while (maybe a few months), but it definitely did not do this in the past. In IE it <i>eventually</i> redirects, but in Firefox it doesn't go anywhere.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/badlinks.jpg

I would "think" the owners would care, since they are losing affiliate click-thrus. You can click on the "Loading..." to get there, but I don't even bother anymore. :shrug:

I get the Loading.. page as well so I just click on Loading... I figured it's probably due to high security settings in the browser.

I think it has to do with either security settings or maybe possibly cookie blocking or something.

I'm familiar with vBulletin programming: It'd be nice if the text filters left the original posts intact and only get applied when displaying a post or thread. That way, if I edit or quote a post, I can edit the original links without the affiiliate stuff and my resulting post won't have recursive affiliate links.

Or, if for some reason, the board changes/updates affiliate info, the revised affiliate links will work correctly. I've seen some older posts with links to buy.com that now don't work at all.