12 thoughts on “Can someone tell me …”

  2. Think tinyurl, only with a setup that lets the person creating the tinyurl mark it as potentially not-safe-for-work for various reasons. (In this case, apparently because of open comments.) It also has the occasionally-useful ability to mask the real referring page.

    That, and the links it produces aren’t really any smaller.

  3. Allows people to hide the IP address and referrer when they hit your site.

  4. Whatever it does, its author posts one of the scariest warnings I’ve ever seen:

    “I don’t guarantee that the Indirectotron 9000™ won’t cause Cher to endlessly sing at you.”

    Gave me a shiver, that did.

  5. Yes, it’s a tool used by denizens of a certain web comic forum, basically for the reasons mentioned by Brad.

    “Open comments” is given as a warning because while the original content may be work-safe, someone may post offensive comments in the mean while.

  6. if you want to decide all the hits are from userfriendly, then you might be right. Mostly.

    Though I’ve used it to link things elsewhere occasionally.

  7. Tinyurl with the ability to add warning text.

    Hides the name of the final link ( they don’t get google ranking credit ), and prevents the destination page’s owner from getting referral info.

    If it offends you, reroute all referrals from them to some clone of a goatse.cx page.

  8. I wanted to add that (knowing the people who use it) it isn’t meant to be malicious or anything, but I guess it can look a bit odd from the recipient’s side. Hadn’t thought about it in terms of Google ranks or hiding referral info. :-/

  9. One thing I do when I get odd referrals is to look at the incoming page. For a while most of that stuff was going to my lolcat parody. I just wish I’d thought of that when the Slovak mail servers were turning up.

  10. Dawg; It’s clear that it is a result of algores global warming causing variations in the flux densisty of the internet (that algore hisself invented) It’s result is to hide itself from itself inside itself. As the global temperature rises this type of stuff will get worse, so y’all better start buying them algore carbon offsets.
    :-^ Roger

  11. Here is the contact info for the domain name of the page. Looks like they are located in Loredo. Do you know anyone there that can knock on a door for you?

    Whois Record

    Domain ID:D8640257-LRMS
    Domain Name:UFTOOLBOX.INFO
    Created On:07-Dec-2004 15:27:08 UTC
    Last Updated On:24-Oct-2007 18:14:52 UTC
    Expiration Date:07-Dec-2007 15:27:08 UTC
    Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R139-LRMS)
    Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
    Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
    Registrant ID:tuftiE1N13ZXPpiM
    Registrant Name:R4L Privacy Advocate
    Registrant Organization:N/A
    Registrant Street1:827 Union Pacific Blvd., PMB 71-257
    Registrant Street2:
    Registrant Street3:
    Registrant City:Laredo
    Registrant State/Province:TX
    Registrant Postal Code:78045
    Registrant Country:US
    Registrant Phone:+1.5149073225
    Registrant Phone Ext.:
    Registrant FAX:
    Registrant FAX Ext.:
    Registrant Email:Whois Privacy and Spam Prevention by DomainTools.com

  12. The UserFriendly.org comments pages have a fairly strict community policy about not linking to sites that might have questionable content. The community employs a “one-click” rule, which basically says as long as the page one click away is clean, it doesn’t matter what happens after that.

    Posts on the community site that violate the spirit of the community rules are moderated. Generally, links to blog sites and what-not that allow open comments are moderated on general principle because the language in the comments can sometimes be rather salty.

    So, the “ID9K”, as we call it, is used to provide an intermediate landing page and a warning to the web surfer that there might be some sort of questionable content.

    No nefarious purposes are intended. We’re not trying to obfuscate the original referrer, steal ad revenue or anything of the sort.

    Disclaimer: I’m a frequent participant on those discussion boards but I’m not in any official capacity on the site. The site owner for User Friendly is J.D. “Illiad” Frazer, and he can be reached at illiad at userfriendly dot org.

Comments are closed.