Recently I’ve been having more that the usual weird side effects from the dope. Just clicked on a thread with 3 or 4 posts. Once I read them, I click on the back arrow (or sometimes use ALT back arrow). Didn’t work. Going up to the back arrow and holding down the mouse button shows your last 10 or 20 URL’s. Instead of one URL for that SD page, there were 6. I’ve seen this happen for at least the last 30 days or so and sometimes the list of page URL’s is 20 items long!
Anyone have any idea WTF is going on?
PS I have never seen this on any other site I visit. Only the Dope.
It’s generally caused by ads and it’s not necessarily something malicious.
When you are developing a web page, sometimes it is easy or convenient to put in a temporary place-holder type of page. Then when you create your actual page, sometimes folks will just change the place-holder so that it forwards the browser to the actual content page so that they don’t have to actually move the new page. Ad providers do this too so that they can easily swap ads in and out without changing the ad server URL.
When your browser hits one of these pages that automatically forwards you, and then you hit the back button, all you end up doing is reloading the page that forwards you, so the back button appears to break. All of the forwards end up as links in your browser history, so you end up with a dozen links instead of the 6 or so you were expecting.
The SDMB itself doesn’t use this type of forwarding, so if you see it on this site it is most likely coming from advertising.
This is also something that is most definitely not unique to the SDMB. You may only be seeing it here, but this is used all over the net. Mostly it is advertisers that use it, but regular sites sometimes use it as well. I see it a lot on news sites. They’ll automatically forward you to the latest copy of a story if something is current and information is rapidly changing regarding the story.
When I visit The Dope on my work computer (no adblock), the back button frequently doesn’t work. If I log in, the problem goes away. From my home computer running Ad Block Plus, this is never an issue, whether or not I am logged in.