The dangers of Tumblr reblogging

Wow, that was tricky. I’ve just spent quite a bit of time figuring out why there were extra advertisements on this blog that had nothing to do with the ad code on the right.

There were underlined ads—those ones with pop-up boxes when you hover over the link. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but these were for a stock tip site in one case, and in two others McAfee wouldn’t even let me go through. It red-flagged the sites.

So I looked through the customization, the template itself, the Javascripts being loaded, and spotted something called loading-resource.com in the status bar. I had never seen this site before, so I’ve since blocked it in my hosts file. (McAfee lists it as dodgy.) A view-source took me to where loading-resource.com was being called from: a reblog. A post I had found and reblogged from the Avengerness Tumblr. 

I’m not blaming Avengerness at all. They had reblogged it, too, but somewhere along the line, there was ad code. Someone is making a few extra bob via Tumblr—not that I begrudge anyone making money from their own blogs—but it’s being done at the expense of everyone else’s. [PS.: After some investigation, these appear to have come via mrsemmapeel07.tumblr.com—I found 16 instances of loading-resource.com code on its home page alone.]

Be careful out there. It’s the first time this has happened to me, and I hope Tumblr manages to get a handle on it, otherwise people will be too scared to reblog.

1 Notes/ Hide

  1. hankyouhaveastupidface reblogged this from jackyan
  2. jackyan posted this