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Post by crystallogic13 on Jan 25, 2020 10:34:53 GMT -5
(First things first, I tried to post this thread in the Forum News and Updates subforum, dungeonsynth.proboards.com/board/8/forum-news-updates but alas, only Admins can create a new thread there so I put it here )
Now, here's the problem : Does anyone else get in this subforum a redirect in ALL external links posted in comments ? Like bandcamp.com for example. The first seconds the link works normally if you click on it, but after some seconds it seems a script on the page (Proboards fault I guess) triggers and all links get a redirect first to a link through "redirect.viglink.com---xxxkeyzzzzxxx---original-site" kind of thing. I caught it yesterday when I clicked on a normal looking external link and ublock Origin blocked the page. It doesn't happen on any other page so it's not me/my PC, I also run antivirus (AVG on this one) and Malware Bytes Anti-Malware so I *guess* it's fault of Proboards and its advertising/monetizing partners ? And it happens to ALL external links... Frustrating.. So, anybode else noticing it, angry with it or anything we can do ? I understand PRoboards is free and great for that so there's that, but still it's really annoying...
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Post by thekeeper on Feb 1, 2020 18:00:23 GMT -5
Proboards redirect everything by creating those vglink urls. It's pretty annoying, but I can't really do anything about it. I'll look into it more, though. From what I understand, it's just a way for proboards to assess outgoing traffic, but doing things through this url redirect way is looked down upon now by most sites since it's a good phishing technique (not that proboards is phishing, but people exploit this mechanism in emails and on front sites). On my phone, I can't even open redirects, I have to cut the whole beginning part of the URL out. I'll do some more research on this.
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Post by crystallogic13 on Feb 2, 2020 1:21:55 GMT -5
Thanx a lot thekeeper and for looking into this, yes indeed it's the bad things that come with being free and all but no problem, I also just copy paste any link instead of clicking it... Thanx for looking into this
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Post by thekeeper on Apr 15, 2020 1:44:09 GMT -5
So from what I've learned is that these link redirects are just a service that proboards uses to help with their tracking and vistation stats. Apparently you can opt out the the vglink collection data from the company's website, but I couldn't seem to get it to work. It's definitely not like malware or anything, but it is an annoying and somewhat outdated method of doing redirects. Not sure why proboards has stuck with them. Right now, there's nothing I can really do about it. Might look into some browser extension stuff that might mitigate how they work.
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Post by crystallogic13 on Apr 19, 2020 0:25:38 GMT -5
Great that you're still looking into in thekeeper, thanx for the update.. I've noticed if you're not logged ln you don't get the redirect but no matter, it's better to know you gone the extra mile and checked if any malware was served via it.. Thanx!
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