Why Engadget Is Blocking the DiggBar

Engadget is using JavaScript (more or less along the lines of Faruk Ateş’s aforelinked solution) to prevent its pages from being wrapped in Digg’s frame. Joshua Topolsky writes:

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

I’m happy to see anyone block or redirect around the DiggBar, but I still think it’s worthwhile to make a stink about it rather than simply redirect DiggBar links to the actual URL. It’s not individual web site publishers’ job to make Digg work like a civil non-bullshitty web site, and the best way I can think of to get Digg to change this is to get Digg users to demand it.

★ Saturday, 11 April 2009