16

Clicking on book recommendations in this SO answer currently redirects one to https://stackexchange.com/site-not-found.

A couple of links from that answer:

The links are being rewritten through rads.stackoverflow.com, a domain that was formerly used to add an affiliate code to these links so SE would make a commission from them. However, that domain is currently down, which means that all Amazon links in all SE posts network-wide are broken.

Improve this question
10
  • 13
    These links generate money for Stack Exchange, so expect a fix in 6-8 minutes rather than weeks :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 1, 2020 at 21:58
  • The links are being rewritten through a domain that was formerly used to provide an affiliate referral code for SE. It appears that that domain has gone dark, so all Amazon links network-wide are now broken.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Apr 1, 2020 at 21:59
  • 3
    @Glorfindel Nope. As of October 2019, those links no longer generate money for SE.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Apr 1, 2020 at 21:59
  • Huh, I must have missed that; I guess something major happened here around that time so this escaped my attention.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 1, 2020 at 22:04
  • 6
    This is a regression related to our switch to .NET core. The team's on it. Thanks for the report!
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Apr 1, 2020 at 22:29
  • 4
    @AdamLear Perhaps it's time to stop rewriting those links since they no longer earn SE an affiliate referral fee as of October 2019.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Apr 1, 2020 at 22:40
  • 3
    Just adding some context: one effect of rewriting them is to normalize the links and remove incentive for users to put many for-profit links on the site. Whether that would be an issue, I'm not sure (because it's not been possible) - but it must be kept in mind. That's one of the reasons we didn't just remove rewriting outright when we shut down the SO referral program. I'm not 100% sure what's up with the URL rewriting here but we'll get it fixed up in the morning.
    – Nick Craver
    Apr 2, 2020 at 1:39
  • @NickCraver As I said in the linked question, we have community tools like SmokeDetector that can check for and report affiliate links, plus it's not that simple to just sign up for the affiliate program. There are a number of existing bugs that I've linked there, such as links to item listings being incorrectly rewritten and thus broken. It's prone to other bugs, and will also break completely if Amazon decides to change the format of links. There's just one advantage that is already taken care of, plus a number of disadvantages that drastically outweigh it.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Apr 2, 2020 at 3:47
  • 4
    @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog With respect, that proposal doesn't make sense to me. Turning a fully automated and low maintenance mechanism into something that the community has to maintain and add workload to the mods because of 1 bug in listings, that's just not a good tradeoff at all. "If Amazon decides to change the format" just isn't going to happen - that's just a "what if?" that'll never happen: they don't want to break all the incoming (for profit mind you) links to them. It sounds like the only real complaint here is the Regex doesn't match listing correctly - we'll look at that.
    – Nick Craver
    Apr 2, 2020 at 10:21
  • @NickCraver There is another complaint there: the general issue that the redirect mechanism is prone to bugs suddenly cropping up and breaking links, just like what happened here. The bug with listings is just an example of one such bug, as evidenced by the words "for instance" before it. Removing the mechanism will make the links immune to such issues.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Apr 2, 2020 at 10:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
12

A fix for this has been deployed.

Improve this answer
1

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .