Links to eBay items broken?

Posted thsi in newbie board - but may be relevant here :

Sounds like another versi0on of the same issue.


Posted June 28, 2005 09:45 AM
I have recently been disabling various advertising sites by creating 127.0.0.1 hosts entries for them.

Since I added adfarm.mediaplex.com I find that the feature to allow me to click on the auction title within the AS page to open a page with the relevant Ebay lot no longer works.

Instead I get a connection refused when talking to adfarm.mediaplex.com.

I understand the connection refused message - that was exactly what I wanted to happen when a page I was accessing wanted to go to adfarm.mediaplex.com.

What I don't understand is why adfarm.mediaplex.com is getting accessed between AS and Ebay.

I know that it isn't carried directly by AS and it appears not to be carried by Ebay as both sites work quite happily on their own.

My suspicion is that the link from AS listing to Ebay items (which appears unecessarily to link through some inteligence rather than directly) is pushing me through a series of advertising sites or preference collecting sites so somebody can make an extra cent or two while using a tiny amount of my processing power and bandwidth and adding an extra second or two to my page response.

There are several other sites involved in the process but I will have to pull them out of my proxy logs as the URLs flash up in the status line too quickly to read.

If my suspicion is correct these sites will be yet more fodder for my hosts file.

Anybody have a similar experience or any insight to what is going on.

John