clicking on links question...

[Fruitbatlings]

How come I suddenly can't open links? It's quite annoying

(macbook pro btw)

You must have clicked on some links to get here?

Try actually quitting the browser (right click on the dock and select quit or select Quit from the menu) and then open it again and see if all is well. Just clicking on the red close button still leaves some of the browser loaded so doing a full quit is important.

If that doesn't work then reboot.

If that doesn't work come back here with some more info on what browser and what OS you're using.

I can't open the links people put on posts, for instance, to another website or to their picture trail.

Tried properly quitting Firefox and have restarted the computer.....

What info do you need? (hopeless with computers )

It's anything that says "redirectingat.com" before the web address. Really weird as it's only been since yesterday. I try to delete the "redirectingat.com" but it won't work at all

says "problem loading page"

The 'redirectingat.com' thing is used by MN for any link that someone puts into a post.

From what I've seen it is used by "publishers" (ie press etc) so that wherever a link goes off to some business website where the business has some commission scheme to get clicks to go to their site, then the "publisher" earns commission.

The only way I can imagine the 'redirectingat.com' links failing is if the website is down, or has been blocked by something - perhaps an add-on in Firefox (?)

Web addresses sometimes show me the redirectingat.com bit (if I do a 'copy link') so if the worst came to the worst, you could copy the link, open a new tab, paste in the link and delete the initial bit mentioning 'reditectingat.com' - cannot guarantee it will work sorry, but difficult to guess what's causing this problem.

Ah forgot to mention - sometimes when there's a web link being submitted via another, then the :// and so on get shown as "%2D" and other codes - cannot remember them offhand...

If you hover over a link then try to remember how many "/" and other symbols like "?" "=" and so on (if any) there are in the weblink.

This is being done on Firefox 3.0.14 on Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.

Here's a link pasted straight in:
news.bbc.co.uk/

And here's one done with the link formatting code:
news.bbc.co.uk/.

I'll be back in a tick describing how they appear to me....

Mmmm, no mention of redirectat.com

The first link is just text, the the second one is the only one that's an actual link.

Does that work for you?

Yes, the link you put in has been rendered as redirectingat.com/?id=470X756&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F

The redirectat.com site goes down/has very high latency from time to time and this breaks everything. It's the price we pay for having an ad sponsered site.

(As this is a geeky topic, do you think I will get away with using the word latency?)

BP - the 'status' display for JS enabled browsers displays only the "proper" link, but now see about copying the link and as MrA indicates, it will be stored in the HTML as ...redirectingat.com...

I would suggest "right-clicking" to use the "copy link" option, but as you are on a Mac, it's presumably not an option (I would really miss having different left-click and right-click, and even centre-click options!)

Yes, a bit geeky, but thanks MrA - you've confirmed my hope that "470X756" was to identify MN, and not the individual who submits a web link, or some combination of MN'X'user. It had bugged me a little to see that web links to sites were being forced through this other service, and I've taken to using TinyURL.com from time to time.

Clearly the "%3A" is the ":" and the "%2F" is the "/"

Testing to see what "?" is shown as...

If you use a tinyurl there will be two redirects before you get to the site you want!

Mac mice have had right buttons for quite some time now

Hi, I'm back! I'm not ignoring you all, thank you so much for helping, just going to have a good read through all your posts, looks very technical to me but if I read properly I'm sure I can make sense of it all ...........

Badgerspaws - your links both work fine

WebDude - your link takes me here: www.google.com/search?q=irectingat+com+?

Is that where you were taking me?

Right click is "control then click" on my Mac

AH! Just checked to see if it's working again and it seems to be fine now, must have been having a melt down or something

Thanks guys/geeks - whatever you like to be called!

xx

redirectingat.com/? was where it took me, Fruitbatlings. The fact yours goes off to Google/Search looks like some add-on or default (are you using Safari browser) has kicked in, as if it cannot find the correct link and therefore defaults to doing a search for it.

Does seem odd that the "r" of "redirectingat" was lost.

MrA - regarding mouse - I was going from the fact a friends fairly new MacBook Pro has only one button to click on it - he brought out a mouse for me to use and admittedly that could have been from an earlier machine, so didn't think they had any two-button mice.

As for the two redirects, so be it. However, if one got a link displayed in the address bar and redirectingat.com was sluggish, one could at least edit the link to tinyurl.com/something (rather than some lengthy string which would be difficult to remember - where I wrote 'something' I would have designated a mnemonic term that suited the example, or subject under discussion).

Two-finger-tap on the trackpad should work for right click on a recent MacBook.

It's nothing to do with an addin, with the mangled URL that gets sent to redirectingat.com, that site redirects to exactly the location Badger says. See the HTTP dialogue here (not a link for obvious reasons )

pastebin.com/m7f2ba196

fullGeekMode := true;
s/Badger/Fruitbatlings/

I have no idea what any of you are talking about, haha Think I'd better back out now