Another forum planting links in posts

[L number Banana]

This question is about the inner workings of another forum that is commercially owned - NOT THIS ONE! I'm asking because people here seem to know the rules of these type of things and may be able to tell me what's going on.

This forum seem to have it's stuff together like no other - thanks Jools!

On another forum, I post something and when I look at it later without being logged in, I find some of the words in my post are linked to commercial sites. The words are underlined and show an ad when someone does a mouse-over. So if I write 'truck', the word gets a direct link to one of the big three auto companies.

I haven't received a reply as to why this is happening but it's really irking me off and I want to know if it's something that my computer may be doing or if it could be the forum? I had a trojan recently that made my computer a zombie (gone now!) but have no adware that anything can pick up.

I'm wondering if my posts are my works and can't be tampered with or if forums own the content jointly, completely or what? I wonder how someone would be feeling when this happens to their post and they work for say Coke and get linked to a Pepsi ad when they write the word 'soda'??!!

Has anyone ever seen this before?

[Jools]

I've seen it done. It's actually not very difficult and I have considered doing something similar in that when a word appears that is in our glossary, then it has a hover over link for the meaning of that word.

As to the question of tampering with you content, that's a very grey one. It could be argued that it's helpful for some, it could be in the T&Cs of the site, you might be able to switch it off, technically it's not much different to changing it's colour. We all enjoy the google translate tool for example, and it mucks around with everyones uploaded words...

However, what you describe is more commercial. First of all, it's the website, not your computer I think but a link to the site would confirm. It's up to the owner of the site in the end, if it's a decent site then they may consider removing it. However it might be a serious income stream for them.

This sounds all very pro, but IME I'd not use something like this as I'd find it too invasive and I would certainly want to manage it more than just let it do its thing.

Jools

[Bas Pels]

@ links to the glossery - I come to a forum where this is the case - and I got to say, it's a huge distraction. I'm happy, Jools, you did not choose similarly

Because the wordt which are most often used which are mentioned in such a glossery are known, or will be known soon

[Jools]

@ links to the glossery - I come to a forum where this is the case - and I got to say, it's a huge distraction. I'm happy, Jools, you did not choose similarly

I agree, but that's just bad programming. You could, for example, count the times that a user has seen a word and, if they've seen it more than 10 times, no longer offer the meaning. Or offer it one time in every 1000. That kind of thing.

Jools

[MatsP]

Or only the first time it's used on a particular page, for the first 100 times in a month.

--
Mats

[TwoTankAmin]

I have always used my mouse as a sort of place holder when surfing. I move my mouse a lot when going through things on any given page. That mouse over stuff drives me nuts. Fortunately most browsers offer a way to disable this function.

I mostly use Firefox and I think I managed to prevent the annoying hot link popups by checking the block popup windows box under Tools/Options/Content. I know there is also a way to do this in IE8 because when I was looking to upgrade my browser I contacted them and they told me how to disable that feature.I deleted that link when I opted for Firefox

[L number Banana]

Thanks Jools and all.

I wouldn't mind so much if it was a glossary type thing and that would be helpful to some but the words that are chosen are not related to the site contents at all. The site is about motorbikes but a word like 'boot' doesn't come up with boots for cyclists but a seemingly random shoe/boot store. I would love it if the description for tech words had a link, it would be helpful to me but irritate the hoo-haas out of some.

I use Firefox with the pop-ups turned off but it still does it. It's very random. I could read for an hour and not come across one link or come across five in ten minutes. If I pay the few dollars for membership, I won't see any ads but I haven't done that yet.

I didn't mention the site because I wasn't sure if it would seem like I was slamming them but it's a really good site, friendly people from all over the world, much like here. I think this feature on their site might be new because a few posters asked other posters to stop posting links as it was spam but then the other poster didn't know what they were talking about. I didn't quite believe them until I saw links attached to one of my posts. Maybe that's what bugged me the most, I was worried people would think I was spamming. Glad to hear it's probably not my computer.

If anyone's interested, the site is http://www.fireblades.org. Planet Catfish has been given a thumbsup on that site because one of the moderators just got a new fishtank She doesn't have any catfish yet but I'm working on it.

Thanks again