The thing that stops all external links from working (unless I turn adblock off)… can it be disabled completely for paying members of the dope?
I will probably just turn adblock off (or more specifically add an exception for boards.straightdope.com) but I still wanted to ask the question.
I did that and still have trouble with external links at home.
We’ve been talking with Driving Revenue about how to solve this problem. They think there may be an issue with interaction between Firefox, vB, and the outboundlink code and are investigating. We’re reluctant to turn off this feature for members since they seem the most likely to purchase products at linked sites and thereby send us some revenue, and in fact several have said they’ll make a point of doing so. We realize inoperative links are a pain and apologize for the inconvenience. For what it’s worth, DR has responded promptly to our requests and appears to working diligently to come up with a solution - we ask your patience while we try to get this debugged.
I use Firefox 3.6.3 and AdblockPlus and I’m not having any problems with external links. ((They did take slightly longer to load when the code was first introduced but that seems to have ironed itself out now.)
Ed “Gormless Wienie” Zotti:
I’m using Firefox 2.0.xxxx, and have been getting odd (but not disastrous) irreproducible unpleasantness, but it eventually goes to the external site. I’m not going to upgrade Firefox to 3.x, until I reinstall the OS (that needs to be done soon, as in by mid-june). If you want input on this version of Firefox, just ask. I will be happy to test, up until I do the “wipe and reinstall” my machine needs. But don’t wait. I’m not going to delay the “wipe, reinstall, and upgrade” to test things for you.
CH
I couldn’t stand this damn thing anymore so I wrote a tiny little greasemonkey script to disable it. Available here. Ed, I’d love to let you guys make a little money, but not by slowly chipping away at my sanity.
I’ve also been noticing a lot of waiting on fbcdn.net and addthis.com while loading SDMB threads, which is directly related to the new sharing baloney. Adding dozens of resources that reside on sites that are out of your control is a great way to make your site seem really slow. Do you have a way to determine whether or not people are actually using that feature so you can turn it off in a couple of months when you find out nobody really wants to tweet about SDMB threads?
Neat. Very clean code, and interesting name. Although my vote would be to call it ntucker’s unsucker 
Feel free to temporarily disable this script when you plan on purchasing any big ticket items through SDMB linked online merchants.
Yeah, ak.fbcdn.net was slowing things down. I’ve now removed the Facebook Share button, so that won’t be an issue anymore.
Yes, the AddThis button has full-featured tracking. One way to speed it up would be to not invoke the menu script on page load, but the trade-off would be the convenience factor.
I will be monitoring both - speed vs. usage - and make changes accordingly.
-xash
Administrator
Or, if you’ve got an ad blocker, you can block http://http.cdnlayer.com/drivingrevenue/* and it won’t load the javascript that changes the links in the first place.
But would it have a cool name like “SDMB Link De-suckifier”?
No, it would not, and for that reason it’s obviously inferior. Besides, I don’t really like content blockers in general. I prefer a scalpel to a chainsaw.