Your shampoo bottle is blue and you use Dial soap.

(and if that happens to be correct then call it a wild guess, and let me know so I can hit the lottery on the way home.)

I run XP with Firefox w/ No Script extension. You can see viglink listed by No Script. I have their script on the disabled list. Take that viglink.com!

I tried No Script once. It became incredibly irritating.

it's not malware. It's there so if a company offers affiliate link payments, IB gets those payments. I don't think it hurts anyone unless if someone spams the forum with their affiliate link in order to get paid for driving traffic to a particular site, IB gets paid instead. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

I wonder if you could intercept it with an entry in your /etc/hosts file:

viglink.com 127.0.0.1

NoScript is irritating only until you've whitelisted most of the sites your frequent that require scripts. After that it only becomes apparent when an unauthorized site tries to run a script.

Yup. There it is:

"<script type="text/javascript"> pxlSiteFile = "bikeforums.net.js"; pxlScriptStart = '%3Cscr' + 'ipt type="text/javascript"'; pxlScriptEnd = '%3C/scr' + 'ipt%3E'; if (location.protocol.indexOf("https") == -1) { document.write(unescape(pxlScriptStart + ' src="https://pxl.ibpxl.com/'+pxlSiteFile+'"%3E'+pxlScriptEnd)); ** else { document.write(unescape(pxlScriptStart + ' src="https://pxlssl.ibpxl.com/'+pxlSiteFile+'"%3E'+pxlScriptEnd)); **
</script>
<!-- / Plugin: IBPxl -->
<!-- VigLink: https://viglink.com -->
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> var DR_id = "1050";</script>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.viglink.com/api/merged.js"></script>
<!-- end VigLink -->"

That would send any external link you click in BF to your computer's default localhost page. So yes you'd intercept it but then you wouldn't go anywhere else.

The link skimmer sends your link to viglink.com who then forwards your request....so if you intercept viglink.com you won't get anywhere.

Disabling JS in your browser is like cutting your nose off to spite your face....Javascript is pervasive across the web....turning it off would break so many things you run across.

FWIW, viglink does offer an optout:

https://www.viglink.com/support/optout

Same here (XP x64). I get the normal eBay link even if Viglink is set to "forbidden," as opposed to "untrusted" in NoScript.

-Kurt

I just tried it and it doesn't work the way you describe -- the link goes directly to the final target. The javascript must have a failsafe to bypass viglink if/when the viglink site is unreachable.

That's how it's running on my side.

-Kurt

I started noticing the viglink in the connections late last week. Couldn't figure what this was and why a connecting to a link would bring this up. thanks Zaphod!

Bill

So for us old farts that haven't updated much on our PCs for some time, can someone give us a brief summary of what we ought to be running and what settings we ought to change?

TIA...

Ubuntu 11.10, Chromium, slow connection - Link goes directly to eBay.

I allow scripts from the same domain (*.bikeforums.net), and aside from a few big sites that use different domains for their scripts (e.g. ebaystatic.com, ebaydesc.com, ebayrtm.com ), it rarely bugs me anymore.

The amount of stuff it ends up blocking is crazy.

Here's another option for dealing with viglink and other trackers: Ghostery

Add-ons available for Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer.

https://www.ghostery.com/download

okay, I've gotten some response from the powers that be, including Tom (lead admin ya know?)

IB/BF do infact use Viglink, it is used primarily to block spam coming in from other links,
i.e. we don't see the bike dating services ads getting in any more. Yes it probably does more
but I'm pretty satisfied with the answers I got. I don't see anything nefarious or disturbing
in all this so I'm good with it (like that matters).

Marty