Why You Should Break The DiggBar | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Break The DiggBar

tomuse.com

26 pointsVizionQuest21 comments

This is starting to border on irritating now. This must be the 57th article on why the diggbar is bad, with 55 of them from this tomuse.com jackoff.

Everyone on HN and their mom knows they should take precautions against the diggbar. We all got the message from the myriad posts about it. Seriously, we get it!!

If it's to get people from HN to visit your site and subscribe to your feed, like you invite them to do with your very own banner on top of the article, well - mission failed. I went out of my way to not subscribe because of how annoying this has become.

There's about a billion other things happening. Try reporting on them for a change.

P.S. you're the first person to make me wish for a downvote option on HN. Good job.

The problem is, "breaking" the Diggbar can screw up traffic stats too. It will either result in an additional, invalid pageview, or mess up referrer stats.

We've elected to add a target="_blank" to all our links when we detect a frame around our content. The Diggbar will stay for the first pageview, but be gone for the second. And our stats are basically correct. We still see Digg as the referrer, we track the right number of pageviews, and life goes on.

Oh, and I meant target="_top", doh.

Why is it always that people who overuse sneaky tactics are the first to complain about others using same techniques?

Copied from the article: "Tags: blogger, Bloggers, browser, digg, diggbar, engadget, entrepreneur, follow me, frame spam, frame spammers, frame spamming, framebars, frames, framing.... " (this is only 2 of 7 lines of "tags")

They're upset they didn't think of it first.

Agreed. It's a great example of the saying:

"It takes one to know one."

What does tagging have anything to do with this article? It's HIS site, HIS tags, he can come up with whatever tags he wants, which contribute to his own custom tag cloud.

Not seeing the connection here sorry.

The connection is this - tomuse has been blogging for a while. Had a few hits here and there, but nothing major. He wrote an article about how bad the diggbar is, and we all agreed with it. Suddenly he has a hit on his hands, and decided to milk it for all it's worth.

Take a look at his homepage - it's all about diggbar/frame spamming etc. He throws a 'Hey HNer, if you agree with me, then subscribe to me' banner up top and adds a thousand tags to his post, hoping people will link to his posts. He then figures if people hate the diggbar on HN, then other people must be feeling the same way and goes to town with pushing the links to his posts all over the web - from techcrunch to mashable to readwriteweb.........take a look at the comments section on those respective blog posts dealing with diggbar. You'll see this guy all over them.

Basically, he's pushing his own agenda/site/blog under the guise of fighting a revolution for the masses. And this is not the first time - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=VizionQuest

He hasn't submitted a single link from another site. It wouldn't matter if it's elsewhere, but that's not cool on HN. HN is about sharing information, mostly foreign. Do you see anyone else submitting links to their own site repeatedly?

Just in case they're all stuffed in a meta keywords tag too.

The connection is that both try to leverage technologies that are frowned upon by community, but THIS site complains about it ad nauseum (visit main page).

(Also, as pointed in other comments - it uses "link cloaking", affiliate links, sneaky referrer banner, etc, yet he still complains about others using sneaky tactics. It's just a full of hipocrisy trick to get readers and maybe some green)

Humorously tomuse.com uses the "Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress" so you can't tell where anything is going (though it does use proper 301 redirects). These things are normally used by scuzzy people trying to hide affiliate stuff. It looks free, but a competitor even has one of those really long marketing pages that are usually used for real estate and eBooks:

http://www.wordpresslinkcloak.com/

It one ups the freebie and uses 302 Moved Temporarily.

This site just got a little more hypocritical

It's also actually used just by people who want to measure which links people are clicking on.

Javascript works fine for that thanks.

Where enabled, yes. Although then you have to send that info back to the server anyway.

There's a number of good reasons to use redirecting URLs for affiliate links. Reason one being click-through statistics.

Hey tomuse.com -- it's great that you got to the top spot on Hacker News! Congratulations! But we know how to subscribe to an RSS feed, thanks, and we can decide for ourselves if we want to. So how about taking down that insulting banner? Thanks!

Thank you. I was going to say the same thing.

Being framed can also expose you to clickjacking attacks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking)

If your site is mostly read-only then clickjacking doesn't really matter. But it's good practice to break frames around your site if you care about your visitor's clicks being spoofed (i.e. if you're running any sort of web application).

Twitter started doing this after they got hit by clickjacking a while ago: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/clickjacking-blocked.html

Interesting article. Digg just seems so irrelevant these days. Yes, they have a lot of users, and can drive some high traffic, but it's all junk.

Maybe the people not bothering to block it realize that DiggBar is likely to flame out on its own.

I wonder how digg consider itself 'Driving a lot of traffic'!

Before the Digg Bar, I can't know how much traffic 'Made Popular' articles make, I asked a power user, he told me from 50K to 100k in just few hours. He told that it would cost you $500 if i want to get it in Front Page. But for that while I have nothing to sponsor and also $500 are not few money.

Now with the digg bar, I realized that Front Page articles can make 80K but generally that make as low as 15k and 8k. So Digg really now don't worth for traffic.

Another reason, Digg is bad, how come an article hit the Front Page with only 2 comments on it??

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