Majestic Sea Creature
Technical Ramblings from Gregory Brown (@seacreature)
About.com Fail
Update: What follows is a bit of a rant that written at a time where I felt insulted and frustrated. Though I think the concern I have is legitimate, I could have been more productive here. If you’re looking for something that provides a bit more perspective, check out this 43 Folders post , which is quite thought provoking.
I used to think of ruby.about.com as just yet another source of dull and uninspired Ruby content designed to churn ad clicks. But that is because I never noticed that they do an evil, Digg-bar style content hijacking on their outbound links. Take a look at this overlay on the Rails website for an example.
The unfortunate way that I discovered this was through an inlink to one of my posts on the RBP Blog. It’s extremely frustrating to see some nasty, completely irrelevant flash banners on top of my content when we took the care to make this blog a clean, simple user experience with absolutely no advertising (except for the occasional link to my book). Though I’m sure it doesn’t meet the legal definition of theft, I really feel like something was stolen away from me when I saw my content presented in this way. The best I could do was throw in a little javascript frame buster, but this is two days after the original post launched.
I mentioned that it’s pretty tasteless to do such a thing in the comments on the ruby.about.com blog, along with a mention of the fact that their complete post was useless because Robert Klemme already showed a more elegant solution in 3 lines in the comments. I’m actually surprised they kept that latter part, but of course, the first part was censored out. Here’s the oh-so-friendly and corporate message I got back from Amanda, the post author:
Mr. Brown, Thank you for your comment regarding exception classes and for pointing us in the direction of another programmer's solution. It's always good to see other approaches and solutions. As for your issue about banner ads and frame overlays, the advertising on About.com sites is not determined by the individual Guides. While I can understand your concern, it's better taken up with the About.com customer service by going to the Customer Care form (http://www.about.com/gi/pages/pform.htm) and making a complaint. As this concern is not relevant to the discussion of exception classes, I will be deleting this portion of your comment. Regards, Amanda -- Amanda Morin Guide to Ruby ruby.about.com About.com | Guidance. Not Guesswork. About.com is part of The New York Times Company
See that? It’s the same “I’m just following orders”, and “I’m not responsible” bullshit that you’d get if an airline screwed you over on flights and left you stranded somewhere for a couple days. While I fully expected my comment to be deleted, I didn’t expect this sort of worthless unpology to show up in my inbox.
This issue is really frustrating to me on a number of levels, not the least of which that I have serious ethical issues with undirected advertisement. It’s true that I have danced with the devil myself, writing several commissioned articles for O’Reilly OnLAMP, but if they ever pulled shit like this, I would have either demanded that they don’t use such invasive advertising techniques on my posts or just up and quit. I know… people have mouths to feed and the internet runs to serve the advertisement overlords, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy with it.
Written by Gregory Brown on 2009.05.15 at 10:33 | Responses