Monday, June 22, 2009

[virus alert] blogrolling dot com


Some of you will remember the ill-fated Blogrolling dot com which had our group blogrolls [and I used them for every roll I had] and then they just crashed.

This necessitated the physical li and slash li laborious method of seeking out each site and re-entering it manually in a new roll. I was not mightily pleased by these bozos but hey - every company crashes from time to time, right? Did they fix the problem? Not on your nelly but not to worry because the new rolls are in place and all's roses.

Cut to the past few weeks. If you use Firefox, then you're in for a shock. Take the previous post, where I posted links to eight news sites. So let's say the link was:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/style/brit-hens-have-
more-pluck-than-this-wussy-canuck/article1189618/

Usual method. I typed the text "5. The Canadians admire British hen nights. Eh?" then inserted the link. Now here's the interesting thing. When I pressed publish and view post, if I then clicked on the link, it had been changed, taken over by:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/redirect.php?retc.

That is, the link to the required page had been virused by this effing rpc blogrolling dot com. Now I never subscribed to them; I never asked them to do this. I just want my bloody link as it was typed in.

What makes it worse is that Blogrolling dot com, who obviously have some sweetheart deal with either Blogger or Firefox, I'm not sure which, can't even get it right. When I clicked on their revamped link, for example on the North Korean story, it didn't take me to the Reuters item, via Google News, which is where I'd come from but instead took me back to Google News itself.

If I'd wanted Google News itself, which I often do, then I'd have clicked on it. But for my readers, if I insert a link to a Reuters story on North Korea, I expect the link to take you to a Reuters story on North Korea.

Now there are three ways to look at this:

1. Find out where Blogrolling dot com work from and take the Kalashnikov;

2. Put up with this;

3. Painstakingly [and have you seen my blogrolling page?] go back, one by one, and remove every single rpc blogrolling dot com link they've taken over, find the original link somewhere and type it back in.

This is not all - oh no. They also have the temerity to spread advertising pop ups over the news site I've accessed, with a little panel to click on, saying, 'Why you are seeing this.'

In my book, this is p--s taking of the most despicable kind. For a start, I haven't the time to do all this extra work due to their incompetence or design. I never wanted it and it added one hour to that post this morning. The post took fifteen minutes, tops, including the search for news. The redoing involved googling every news site individually, finding the item, clicking, copying, opening the Blogger post, inserting and so on.

Blogrolling dot com are high on my list of incompetent, greedy, smug organizations to wipe off the face of the earth and I feel a dose of Devil's Kitchen swearing coming on.

The reason it probably won't happen to you, to the same extent, is that you might not use Firefox and you might not have changed your blogrolls recently. This seems to be the entry point for the Blogrolling dot com Virus. But keep your eyes peeled anyway.*

Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!

UPDATE: I've just checked my Blogrolls template and yep - they've taken over all the news sites and about half the links to fellow bloggers. I should have been more careful, I suppose but I wasn't expecting this to happen. This is not unlike Connex with trains. So incompetent they're booted out of Britain, so where do they go? Downunder to stuff up Melbourne's trains instead. You should read what Melburnians are saying. :)


* Have you ever considered what the act of peeling your eyes would involve? Just asking.

3 comments:

  1. I ditched blogrolls, preferring what blogger has in its templates

    ReplyDelete
  2. We've just been talking about it and it might be Blogger whose made this deal with Blogrolling dot com [or Firefox U.S.].

    ReplyDelete
  3. It does seem a little odd what is happening to you...

    I use Firefox and I haven't had that problem, but as you know I have now transferred to self hosted wordpress!

    Maybe I need to have a little play around on my test blogger site and see what happens there...

    ReplyDelete

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