Weird outgoing clicks in stats???
-
I have the no-ads upgrade, so these unexplained outgoing clicks seem really strange. I certainly never put any such links into my blog, so who/ what did??? and where are they???
There are several of them all nested under “smartfox{dot}com” in the outgoing clicks section of my stats today.
The urls all look the same – the above address plus long strings that contain pop among other stuff…The really weird coincidence if it is one, is that my newly published post has a photo i took of an in-progress braided (ie woven) inscription that says “The quick fox…” !!! It’s just a photo, no text — no, come to think of it I did refer to it in the text as the quick fox braid…
Is my blog hacked? How could there be outgoing links that I did not put there?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hey there,
These links are not appearing for me on your blog which leads me to believe that you have some malware on your personal computer, possibly even in the form of a browser extension which is generating links on your blogs.
Check your browser extensions and disable all the ones you are not familiar with.
-
Thanks for the tips, that’s very scary. I disabled the one extension I had – I do use it sometimes but it’s not crucial.
Btw, the same page on my browser told me that my Java was way out of date (yeah, because for the last year or so every time it tries to update it fails, same when I try to update it). Could that have been a source of malware?
Since neither of us could get it to update, my just slightly more tech-savvy partner finally totally uninstalled and reinstalled it, and now it’s finally up to date…I don’t understand any of this so for me its like a blind person trying to feel my way through a print book!
the suspect url was smarterfox, not smartfox for what thats worth.
-
Smarterfox is a browser add on (extension)
This is what you were seeing then on your blog (that no one else could see) Did disabling this get rid of your issue?
-
I don’t understand the how – but the staff have said that it is possible for someone with and infected browser to leave bogus outbound clicks
for a double check if you want – use the Omnisearch function
Dashboard >> Home >> Omnisearch – try searching for the full link and a subset – – Omnisearch will search your entire site
I have had bogus links a few times on my site – scares the daylights out of me every time
-
I don’t see any more weird outgoing links yet today, just the ones from this morning.
The thing is I never had that “smarterfox” add-on! I can’t even find it in the list of available add-ons that my browser prompts me about. Lots of other “foxes” but not “smarterfox.”
In fact I didn’t have any ‘add-ons’ apparently. I had one active “browser extension” and I disabled it (it was an ebay aution sniper, probably got me bad karma, anyway!)
When I do a search of my add-ons on that browser popup page for add-ons, nothing comes up. All I can find are lists of available add-ons with a box to check if I want to activate them. None are already activated…
Is an add-on the same thing as a plug-in??? I do apparently have a few plug-ins, that list seems to be things I do need like microsoft office, windows live photo gallery, google earth, java. There is also a “java deployment toolkit” or something like that that there is a note saying firefox is blocking it because there are known problems with it. Anyway all the plugins say “up to date” now that we reinstalled Java…
-
Sorry, I was replying to mikepricetw above, should have made that clear!
Thanks auxclass, I will try that.
-
-
@auxclass – The omnisearch didn’t find it anywhere on my blog, either the “root” smarterfox url or the full url of one of the eight.
the staff have said that it is possible for someone with and infected browser to leave bogus outbound clicks
Does “someone” refer to me, or to someone reading my blog???
I mean, is the possibility that it’s my browser that’s infected or that it’s someone elses? -
Someone reading your blog, not you unless your browser was infected
Infected browsers seem to be real obvious – people show up daily in for forum complaining about the “out of control ads & pop-ups” –
I also flagged this thread for the staff to weigh in
-
Hey there
I am a bit confused as to whether or not you still see the same outgoing links on your blog that have been there since you posted this in the forums.
They honestly sound like something a browser extensions adds to websites you visit since you mentioned writing about a quick fox and the link goes to something about a fox.
Either way, hopefully someone on staff might have a clue if they have seen this before on WordPress.com. Good luck
-
Hi mikepricetw,
Thanks again for your help, whether or not it applies to this glitch it was really good for me to get to that area of my browser and find out what extensions I had and what plugins were out of date…I never saw those actual links anywhere on my blog, what I meant was that I saw a listing of them yesterday morning in my stats, in the section called clicks (lower right on stats page), which is supposed to be a listing of any clicks readers have made on outgoing links anywhere on my blog. My blog is pretty small potatoes, averages around 300 views a day, so those 8 clicks to one unknown url stood out.
Only I can put links on my blog, as far as I knew, anyway — aside from the links that commenters leave, but the omnisearch said that the bogus links were not in any of my blog’s comments.
So far today all my outgoing clicks today have been to urls that are in fact links on my blog that I recognize, so no bogus links have been activated today, thank goodness.
Thanks again to you and Auxclass, I’ll wait and see if staff have anything to say about it…
-
I am very sorry I totally misunderstood the issue! I feel like a dummy :) Hopefully I haven’t wasted your time and hopefully someone here might have a better answer.
I am pretty advanced at WordPress.org but really new to the WordPress.com world. Good luck on finding the issue and hope you are having a great Labor Day!
-
Hi there!
It sounds like auxclass’s suggestion is correct here. It’s likely that someone visiting your site had the smarterfox add on installed in their browser. Particularly, the links seem to be related to an extension that highlights words and allows the user to look them up using common search tools. This extension caused these outgoing links.
I hope this clears things up for you.
-
Thanks for that info, shawnajroberts (almost makes me want to go back and see what they were looking up on my site)!
And thanks again mike and auclass, I appreciate all your input…
–Ingrid -
- The topic ‘Weird outgoing clicks in stats???’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 