Click a link and need to go back 10x to get back. Yes, I enjoy the footballs.

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    5 months ago

    Three things.

    1. Yes. Sometimes this is malice. Sometimes this is an attempt to drive impressions and page views.

    2. This can also be caused by poorly configured web applications that update in real time. If, say, some sports website is giving you real-time data about the game as it progresses, a poorly configured web application might be creating a dynamic URL for every change. When you access the older page, it will be instructed to take you to the most recent data, so pressing back is taking you to old data on that page, and then immediately realizing that data is old so refreshing it with the most relevant data.

    3. This is a super common misconfiguration in single page web applications. Domain.com will take you to an application that renders at domain.com/en-us/home. Pressing back takes you to domain.com, and guess what happens next?

    This is basically 99.99% of these cases. I would say if its on some shitty news site with 1000 ads that somehow sneak by AdBlock and UBlok Origin, it’s case 1. Otherwise, it’s case 2 or 3.

    The picture instance is either case 1 or 2.

      • mrvictory1@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        MS makes a redirect to log you in, you can hit back button twice to escape. Bad design but not malice.

    • ajikeshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      and neither case provides a service in a state that should be exposed to the outside. Either due to malice or incompetence.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      5 months ago

      Any website managed/developed by someone certified in the last decade or more knows not to do that.

      It’s absolutely malicious, both to drive SRO and to keep “accidental” clicks from backing out so quickly

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    182·
    5 months ago

    What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

    If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare “One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation.” Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes “We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we’ll replace that first navigation.”

    I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that’s not possible.

    • Robert7301201@slrpnk.netEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      We just got vertical align last month. There’s so many things they should be working on but are too busy trying to add more ads or monetization features.

      I think the web is just too long in the tooth at this point but there’s nothing we can do.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        CSS features like vertical alignment would be defined by web standards. Those fall under the non-profit org W3C. They’re pretty slow about things as to not break the fuck out of everything.

        Browser behaviour like merging redirects falls on browsers tho, so yeah, we can blame Chrome or FF on that one.

        • Overshoot2648@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Still waiting for CSS Color 4 so SVG gradients don’t look like shit. sRGB gradients are completely broken.

  • terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Not sure about that site specifically, but others that’s done it to me was easy to get around. Most of them are thwarted with basically double clicking the back button.

    • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      As the screenshot illustrates, the redirects have been repeated many times to thwart that strategy.

      • terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I get that, forgot to mention that clicking the back button very very fast is what usually works for me.

        Regardless, it’s annoying af

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    21·
    5 months ago

    microsoft does this with their community support/forums/whatever and it’s annoying when you’re trying to look up a problem in google. :///

  • Eiri@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    5 months ago

    I’ve always wondered. Is there really a benefit to a ton of redirects like that? Like, do they gain anything by making it harder to back out?

    Or is it just extremely incompetent website programming?

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      I always just assumed it was a form of “dark pattern” meant to try to stop people from leaving their website once they’ve entered (e.g., coming from a different site, you can’t just hit backspace or click back to immediately exit their site. You’re stuck now).

      • Eiri@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I think that’s right for a website where you accidentally clicked an ad and now it’s trying to convince you you have a virus and you need to download their virus to remove it. Or maybe for an ad pop-up where annoying you might increase the chances that the content makes it into your brain.

        But for a news website i have trouble seeing the logic.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Any page that makes their revenue through ads do everything they can to maximize engagement, and that means keeping them on your website as long as possible. So any little thing they can do to that end, they will.

          • Eiri@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            I’d have expected ad providers to catch on pretty quickly that there’s cheating involved, no?

            • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              They also get paid off of this, the advertiser pays for those impressions.

              Advertisers can’t switch because they can’t not be present on big platforms. The whole ad industry is just companies scamming each other and the consumer.

            • Krauerking@lemy.lolEnglish
              21·
              5 months ago

              Nope. They just hear back about number of views and how it influences the shoppers and brags about how it works.

              I honestly think it’s mostly the idea of advertising that keeps it running as an industry.

              Like Facebook juicing their video viewership and recent news about Google using off screen ads in their views and impressions numbers.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nlEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      What helps with this is clicking links with mousewheeldown, I automatically opens in a new tab. Also MWD on the tab label will close it, so you don’t have to aim for the ‘x’.

      A mouse with thumb buttons is really handy as they do foreward and back, double clicking that gets you out of the issue caused in op

  • officermike@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2061·
    5 months ago

    Yeah, I also hate back-button hijacking. I suspect some websites do it to artificially force more page views for ad revenue. Try a long-press on the back button to view the history for that browser tab and click on the most recent page you think won’t redirect.

    • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
      266·
      5 months ago

      Youtube does it, and it just continues to blast the wrong video you accidentally just auto-started because instead if fucking off, it shows other videos with the bad video getting just reduced.

      Aaargh for the state of todays internet

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      I hate that this is even a feature in the web standard. A result of some massive corporate corruption for sure.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        I recently looked into this after it seemed like Facebook messed with my back button on a private mobile window:

        Someone pointed out that it’s nice to have, for example, your email provider know that you probably want to go back for a message to your inbox instead of going back to the previous page.

        But what if browsers monitored which sites abused the feature and showed a pop-up when you click the back button, just like they offer to show you notifications? They could show you:

        This site has been reported to hijack the back button. Would you like to go back to the last domain that you visited?

        and offer to remember the setting.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.caEnglish
      81·
      5 months ago

      I usually right click the back button and go 2 entries back. Done.

      Microsoft also does this a lot on some of their sites.

      • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.todayEnglish
        27·
        5 months ago

        Usually with this, it’s like 20 entries, so pushes everything else off.

        The ones where it’s only a couple entries mostly seem to be the ones where there’s multiple articles on a single page and it’s at least might be attempting to be helpful?

  • ober9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    5 months ago

    Aren’t they scamming their advertisers too? Because if you click the back button a bunch of times it’s gonna reload a bunch of them on every click. At least if your internet is fast enough.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      Impressions are usually deduped, meaning multiple impressions from the same user during the same session are just counted as one. The big ad networks are extremely careful to avoid miscounting of any sort and will generally err on the side of undercounting rather than overcounting (since telling advertisers they got more impressions or clicks than reported is way better than telling them the numbers were accidentally inflated). Of course, there’s the occasional bug, but it mostly works as expected.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Usually the ad needs to be in your viewport for at least a few seconds to count as an impression. If you were just going back quickly, or quickly refreshing the page, it won’t count. If you go back or refresh, see a different ad, wait a bit, then refresh again, I think it’d count.

          For skippable ads on YouTube, the advertiser only pays if you watch past the point where you can skip it. If I remember correctly, you have to watch at least 30 seconds of the video (or the full video if it’s less than 30 seconds) for it to count as a view.

      • SLVRDRGN@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I just realized you meant data deduplication instead of “not duped by you bitches anymore”

        • Mushroomm@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Alright lol so long as you understand being forged by the fires of the early internet deems you responsible to be aware of such tomfoolery against us internet patrons. Convince 10 computer illiterate friends to install ublock origin and all shall be forgiven haha

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Only the first time you visit in a while though.

      I think it’s taking you away to a login page, logging you in, then bringing you back.

      I can see the point if you were going to ask or answer a question, but 99% of the time you just want to see how somebody else didn’t get their problem solved by some random Indian guy who people assume works for Microsoft, who think the solution to everything is running “sfc /scannow” which has replaced chkdsk as the command most likely to take a long time, do nothing, and make the question asker go away without a solution to their problem.