Anyone have a clue what is going on?
I've been getting a steady stream of really oddball email from this blog's contact form. They look like this:
Shoutwire is some sort of digg clone that doesn't even have comments, it just has a frame around other sites and you vote on links and I can't tell if this person thinks I run it or thinks I hijacked it.
why are you jacking pages?
Another one, and when I replied to this one asking them to explain, I got nothing in return. This is the weirdest one of all:
Why do I get your site when I am trying to get the Fox47News web site?
It must be a default browser thing, sorta like when you type in http into firefox and you end up at microsoft?
And another:
it bites the way your site hijacks links
I wish someone would write me back on this that doesn't think I am stealing something. A few months ago someone said an old article on Wired News redirected to this blog, but perhaps it was just a bad HTML link. I'd sure love to get to the bottom of this and figure out what combination of exact browser version plus links ends up with people on this site. If anyone has any ideas, do tell in the comments here because I can't figure it out and no one will email back to explain.
update: the person that sent the first feedback wrote me back and posted it to shoutwire's site here. On my mac with firefox, I don't get redirected here, but if anyone clicks on this link and ends up here, do leave a comment telling me what browser/OS you are running? Thanks.
another update: So here is the offending page. Click on the blue title and you'll end up here, but the crazy thing is that in the middle, the word "nothing" is google searched, and since I'm apparently the first result, people get redirected here.
So I think the issue is that whatever content management system foxnews.com is running, somewhere, somehow, instead of responding to browsers with a real 404, the phrase "nothing" is being returned on their app server, so browsers like firefox are guessing on it by running a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search for the phrase, ending up here. Hopefully someone at foxnews.com notices and fixes this soon.
conclusion: As Phil figured out, javascript on foxnews.com checks to see if it is being presented within HTML frames on another server, and if so, it redirects to http://nothing/. Firefox by default does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for any word you put in your address bar, and I am apparently the first result for "nothing" on google, so you end up here. I would direct folks to a page explaining this but there is no referrer sent from the I'm Feeling Lucky search. I guess those of you looking for foxnews.com, don't use whatever site tried to load foxnews within a frameset, as they are just putting a frame around other sites. Just go to foxnews.com yourself.