What is viglink.com?

[Sargon III]

I just have a question and been scratching my head for almost 20 minutes, what is viglink.com, I am asking because when open my last image in IE (internet explorer browser) the tab title show as viglink.com anybody has any clue about this.? See attached pictures:

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[Helen]

I read somewhere that it's like a tracker. Read here: Click Here

[Goonfella]

Helen have you tried the Do Not Track+ plug in ? Or does anyone else know if it works?
Sounds like a handy thing to have.

Well I now know it does work. I installed it and did you know there are 2 ad networks and 5 companies tracking you on this website ? I bet you never gave them permission either!

Nice find Helen.

[barbieq25]

It didn't show up on mine. I use Google Chrome. What web browser are you using?

[Helen]

@goon and barbie: I use Chrome, too, but for some reason, I noticed that it showed up on my browser, as well as it did for Sargon. Hmmm...I'm thinking they're trying to plaster advertisements everywhere I go. I didn't realize so many people have nothing better to do.

My kitchen needs cleaning at least five times a day...

[Goonfella]

I use Firefox so I just installed their plug in.

[Sargon III]

Thanks everyone and thanks Helen for the link, I made some search also but didn't find your link,
@ barbie, it shows only on Internet Explorer browser with me, I am using IE9 now.
It is really weird, I deleted the image from my Photobucket account, and cleaned all the caches, history and cookies from all my browsers, then restarted FireFox, opened the forum and clicked on the link, hehe the file was still active, and the URL is still the same from Photobucket, but I noticed the file name was changed, there was an extra dash one (-1) added to the file name at the end.
Then tried next day but the link was dead and the image wasn't there, then I uploaded it again with the additional (-1) to keep the link active.

[Goonfella]

Sargon I Googled viglink.com to see what it was and apparently it`s a way to earn money through links on your blog or whatever.

www.squidoo.com/viglink-review

There are also videos on YouTube about it as well. Maybe you inserted some code without realising. I tried my PB images and none of them have viglink.com showing like with yours.

[Pixey]

I'm not seeing that link on either IE, Fox or Safari - for once I was spared the aggro ;D

[Sargon III]

It is actually there even if it doesn't show on the tab title, you can see it for few seconds when you open any image in new tab in IE9 then it disappears. Whenever you click a link of image it goes first to their site then it redirect you to Photobucket.
And if you view the page source (html file) you can see the hyperlink to that site, all pages of this forum are linked to viglink, I checked several page and saw it in all of them:

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[Goonfella]

Well I suppose as it`s a free forum they try to make money out of the links. First I`ve heard about it though.

I`m sure my browser loads pages faster now that those sites are being blocked. Anyone else find this?

[Sargon III]

Yes, Gooni you are right and if you disable the java script you will disable them also.

[Goonfella]

I thought Javascript was needed to make the browser work?

I know Java is a different thing and can be disabled , which I had done already , but not Javascript.

[Sargon III]

If you disable java script, the ads won't show up and some features of the site won't respond, I recommend to keep it enabled, disable it only for test purpose of a site.

[Pixey]

Thanks for explaining @sargon. Actually, I made a miss statement in my post, as I don't use IE (don't like it at all) but I have Chrome instead (as well as Firefox & Safari) and, as stated, I don't see this vigilink anywhere, when I use any of those three. I'm now thoroughly confused - perhaps it's only happening in IE?

Ignorance is bliss for me

[Goonfella]

I recommend NOT installing DNT+. I ran a scan with SAS and whereas before it used to find only 2-3 tracking cookies this time it found over 200!
So I removed them, did a small amount of surfing, scanned again and found 69!
Removed the plug in, surfed again , scanned again and found 0 trackers without the plug in.
DNT+ is just a tracker carrier , not a tracker blocker. DO NOT INSTALL!

On reading up a bit more about it DNT+ uses something called `opt out' cookies. It`s these that SAS finds when it scans. The more you surf the net, the more are planted on your PC. They say they do not collect any data using them but surely the whole point of this plug in is to block ALL tracking cookies, not replace them with others.

[barbieq25]

Oh dear! Thanks for the heads-up Goonie

[Goonfella]

Apparently these opt out cookies are perfectly harmless and are there to instruct the website you are visiting not to use tracking cookies so they are necessary to make the plug in work. But I still feel uneasy about using DNT+ because you`ll never know if a bad one has slipped through. It is possible to tell SAS to ignore tracking cookies so all the DNT ones won`t be detected, but then neither will more serious ones. So it`s not a good idea to do this.

Abine, the company that makes DNT, realise that using all these tracking cookies is not a good idea and does put people off so they plan to update the plug in in the future to use a different method . But for now I will not be using their plug in.

One thing I think they should do is update the description on the plug in list to warn people about all the extra cookies that will be planted on their system. If people are warned beforehand about the tracking cookies they might not get alarmed when they see them - like I and other people did.