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Links and giving the okay


Isonzo Karst

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As of this morning I notice that clicking any off site link from a profile it brings up a pop up, "Hey wait! You’re about to leave Geocaching.com. Are you sure you want to do that?" and requires giving an okay.

 

See the hunt link at the bottom of my profile

http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?id=107867

 

the same link from a log does NOT require giving an okay?

https://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LUID=04fed568-9d82-4609-8100-f6d84b18d4f8

 

the same link from a cache page does not require giving an okay...

link at bottom of this cache page, if anyone cares

http://coord.info/GC191BY

 

curiously wondering?

edited to actually provide the links ;-)

Edited by Isonzo Karst
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As of this morning I notice that clicking any off site link from a profile it brings up a pop up, "Hey wait! You’re about to leave Geocaching.com. Are you sure you want to do that?" and requires giving an okay.
Well, that's certainly annoying.

 

At least the links work once you get through the pop-up nagging. And the pop-up nagging can be dismissed with the Return key.

 

But this seems to be catering to people who don't know how links work, at the expense of those who do.

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This is a standard on many websites to just simply warn users that they are being directed away from our domain by clicking a link (and something our Legal team has asked us to begin implementing around the site). You've seen it already in Message Center, and now in Profile. It is definitely coming to other places across our domains. It is a minor annoyance, buy alas, it is one we must deal with to provide some browsing security within the Geocaching domains.

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Groundspeak (or anybody), you are not the only worthwhile site on the internet. I am free to leave your site at any time. If you have a good site, I'll come back.

Oh, come on. Sure, those pop-ups are annoying, but looking at them as arrogance is absurd. It's perfectly reasonable for gc.com to make sure you know that you're leaving the area they vouch for and are being sent to a site with unknown visitor protections. Personally, I admit I find the pop-ups silly, but when I read these negative reactions that act as if every site on the web is as safe as gc.com, I can see why they think the pop-ups are necessary.

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As of this morning I notice that clicking any off site link from a profile it brings up a pop up, "Hey wait! You’re about to leave Geocaching.com. Are you sure you want to do that?" and requires giving an okay.

 

See the hunt link at the bottom of my profile

http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?id=107867

 

Annoying behavior on the Lily Pad's part.

 

With Javascript off, the link opens in a short, wide frame. With Javascript on, I get the nannying message in a popup. Right click, open in new window works, though, even with Javascript on.

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(and something our Legal team has asked us to begin implementing around the site).

 

Now I'm curious. Why would that be something a legal team asks for?

 

I'm not part of the legal team, merely a lackey at their whim. However, I'd assume it's just a good practice to dissolve responsibility for bad browsing habits by the users who don't pay attention to the links they are clicking on. Phishing schemes, keyloggers, etc.. are a reality of the world today and would make any legal person nervous.

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In real life I am a nervous lawyer, employed by a giant bank. Here is the warning text that pops up when a user leaves our website by following a link to one of our social media sites:

 

You are now leaving giantbank.com. Thanks for visiting.

 

Giant Bank provides links to third-party web sites as a convenience to our visitors. We have no control over linked sites and make no representations about any content, products or services available at these locations. Such sites may have different privacy, security and accessibility standards. As a reminder, [social media site] is a site open to the public, operated by a third party: do not post any confidential information such as passwords, account numbers or User IDs in your post. When accessing social media sites such as [social media site], we recommend that you review their terms and conditions, as well as privacy and security policies.

 

Such warnings are common in my industry and I also see them regularly when browsing other websites. And that's for company-controlled content, never mind a user-controlled page like a geocacher's public profile. A link could take you to a phishing site posing as an authorized API partner, and ask for your Geocaching.com account number and password. Boom! You've lost control of your Geocaching.com account.

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With Javascript off, the link opens in a short, wide frame. With Javascript on, I get the nannying message in a popup. Right click, open in new window works, though, even with Javascript on.
I didn't try disabling JavaScript completely, but I did blacklist geocaching.com in NoScript. The Profile Information is then stuffed into a short wide frame that requires a lot of scrolling, but which has no scrollbars or other obvious indication that scrolling is possible.

 

But Command-Click works again, opening the link in a new tab. Unfortunately, regular Click just clears everything from the Profile Information section except for the Profile Information heading itself.

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From my smartphone, when I open a cache on gc iun a browser I have to confirm 4 times which is very annoying. Do others have this experience also?

 

Yes! I have this experience as well, very annoying. I thought it had something to do with my settings, since I didn't see anyone else complain and my phone is pretty new.

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Such warnings are common in my industry and I also see them regularly when browsing other websites.
In contrast, I don't remember the last time I encountered one of these warnings, other than Groundspeak's new warnings on the profile page.

 

Coincidentally, I encountered one of those warnings from another site yesterday. It was from a federal government site that contained some official government policies and legislation and had some links to other "unofficial" (but endorsed) sites. Given the type of information available on the site I could understand the importance of having such a warning.

 

 

 

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Such warnings are common in my industry and I also see them regularly when browsing other websites. And that's for company-controlled content, never mind a user-controlled page like a geocacher's public profile.

 

A bank is something quite different than a site for a leisure activity and account data are completely different to data about geocaching.

For me it has already one step to far to turn geocaching into a business and now applying practices from the world of banks etc are many additional steps to far for me.

 

A link could take you to a phishing site posing as an authorized API partner, and ask for your Geocaching.com account number and password. Boom! You've lost control of your Geocaching.com account.

 

That still can happen and can never be excluded. Those who are naive enough to provide their data in such a setting will certainly do it also when being warned that they were directed to a site outside of geocaching.com.

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I just tried it on my phone. With Chrome (on Android), I got only one popup, but when I selected the browser's option to prevent "this site" from opening more popups, the offsite links stopped working entirely.

 

With the default browser (on Android), I got only one popup, and the option to prevent "this site" from opening more popups was not available.

 

Interestingly, in both cases, long-press > Open in New Window worked just fine.

 

What mobile browser produced 4 confirmation popups?

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Yep. Maybe a Grease Monkey script can fix this and make Command-Click (Ctrl-Click) work normally again.

I have a proof-of-concept script working that completely removes the warning popup and allows click and ctrl-click to work properly. I need to do some more testing before I release it, in case it has any adverse side-effects. If anyone knows of any profiles that make use of JavaScript events on links (other than FindStatsGen), I'd appreciate it if you could send me a link to the profile.

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The latest Release Notes includes discussion of this bug:

 

On 12/17/2015 at 9:46 AM, Lil Devil said:

I have a proof-of-concept script working that completely removes the warning popup and allows click and ctrl-click to work properly. I need to do some more testing before I release it, in case it has any adverse side-effects. If anyone knows of any profiles that make use of JavaScript events on links (other than FindStatsGen), I'd appreciate it if you could send me a link to the profile.

Profiles can no longer use JavaScript, so you no longer need to worry about your Greasemonkey script conflicting with profile JavaScript.

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