So are you planning to remove the “Automatically parse links in text” option from the post editor, since the board effectively now ignores it?
How come the last example opens on the current page instead of opening in a new tab as usual? Also, the “link added by viglink” shows up on the last one but not the others.
For the first three, the links are added by the board software. The last one was added by VigLink with a script on your local browser.
No, he broke all the links to see if viglink would “fix” them. Viglink, not board software fixed the last three.
No. I have viglink disabled and the first 3 are still clickable links. That’s board software, that is.
This is nuts. I’m confused and I know others are too. There are multiple ways to block viglink which may or may not work. There are multiple ad blockers; ADBLOCK, ADBLOCK PLUS and others & all are not supported on all browsers. After seeing this thread, I added http://api.viglink.com to javascript exceptions in Chrome to block. This seemed to fix some (most) of the problems / issues. Now, later, I get confused and go back to my javascript exceptions and my block says “allow”. Now knowing me, I probably did that myself. So I change it to block and I see the same links still being fixed. Then I tried adding [*.]viglink.com as another javascript exception to block. I still don’t see any difference, but by now I’m not sure what can and cannot be fixed.
I also found that viglink does not respect the “code” tag.
nm
I think it’s fairly safe to say that the correct answer to the OP’s question is that Viglink is some crap software that modifies the contents of posts in ways that the posters definitely didn’t intend (e.g. modifying CODE blocks, inserting links to porn), and that the board administration doesn’t really understand it or know how to control it, but since it’s part of one of their desperate attempts to make a couple bucks, they prefer to ignore the problems it causes rather than remove it.
Just like with the malware problem, they’re going to ignore all complaints until there are some actual consequences to the board. Consequences to the users and their enjoyment of the board do not concern them. I doubt the consequences of this problem will be as stark and hard to ignore as the precipitous drop in traffic the malware caused, so they’ll probably just ignore it forever.