I just found out that some of LolaKo’s visitors may have been redirected to ads due to a widget I had on my site. I apologize if this happened to you. After some research I learned it was caused by “Sitemeter”, which was recommended by someone I trusted — and I’ve had it on this site since my first post in 2011. Never had problems until now, and apparently, when Sitemeter was bought by another company.
Anyway, I deleted it, it’s gone, and if you had this problem, or it continues, please contact me. And again, apologies if this affected you!
It turns out the redirects happened with WordPress sites, with Sitemeter installed (free or paid versions), and if you use browsers other than Firefox (?). How annoying… actually more so, it is nefarious! Which is why I’m posting this information, as the fix was not so obvious
From the University of Pennsylvania Language Log:
…But as of yesterday evening, for a significant period of time, every single attempt to access a LLOG page resulted in a glimpse of the desired page followed quickly by redirection to x.vindicosuite.com, which is apparently some sort of passive DNS replicator or something. As far as I can tell, no virus or worm attack was involved, but the redirection alone is unacceptable, even if this is just another bug in sitemeter’s counting software rather than anything malicious.
It seems that a lot of other people had the same problem with sitemeter (see also here, and many other comments over the past couple of years). So I’ve removed the sitemeter code from our WordPress installation. Now I can look forward to wasting a few hours trying to get sitemeter to stop charging me for their “service”.
Sometimes you think you just have a “blog” and it infuriates me that these things happen,and then I have to research to figure out why my the clicks on Jetpack were showing “x.vindicosuite.com” links instead of the usual and typical ones I see for my blog (the countries where Filipinos work overseas, or informational links for visitors who come looking for information on Tilapia, or the Philippine Eagle photos of all things!).
Reminds of this cartoon I posted 2 months after I started my blog when I went through what I THOUGHT was a simple task to change my domain name registry.
Bizarro Cartoon 5-26-2011
If you are a fan of Bizarro cartoons as I am, or just want to laugh, here is the link to the blog, www.bizarrocomics.com, with the tagline “A daily blog by Dan Piraro, creator of the syndicated newspaper cartoon, Bizarro. It has cartoons, art, photos, thoughts, vids, nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Please enjoy responsibly”.