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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

I can't get too ticked at O'Reilly and IntelliTXT

You know what I've been annoyed by lately? Those contextual ads masquerading as double underlined links in the middle of the page. Aren't these uncomfortably like Microsoft's Smart Tags? Eh, maybe not, since the site owners are willing collaborators—which makes it more of a successful service than a monopolist's sinister plan.

On the other hand, in the midst of writing this little rant, I noticed that they provide a mildly hidden opt-out at the bottom of the FAQ page. Bah. It's annoying, but at least there's that.

And, well, folks gotta make money somehow I guess. The FAQ page is very honest about it:

As we're sure many will appreciate, there is pressure for us to generate revenue from advertising to cover all of the costs, and this is an opportunity for us to do just that.

So, other than the poor user experience of the popup layer when I accidentally roll my mouse over the wrong thing--I can't say they're being crass about it.

Nonetheless: How long until I get itchy enough to make an anti-IntelliTXT Greasemonkey script, I wonder?

Archived Comments

  • Dominik Schwind

    I found this one: http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks/archives/2005/09/29/#item44519 it seems to be working fine.

  • Jason Clark

    Lazyweb has beaten you to the punch. I use IntelliTXT Disabler, which I found at userscripts.org, and which is also available from the author. It runs after the page loads, of course, so you see the links appear briefly and then disappear. I've found it quite useful.

  • Justin

    Greasemonkey is overkill for something you can block with CAPS:

    user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.itxtInited", "noAccess");
  • Henning Koch

    Because being fooled by IntelliTXT camouflage makes me want to buy shit every single time.

  • Brian Donovan

    I'm subbed to your blog but just came across this entry while searching for other IntelliTXT-cleaning GM scripts to help me decide whether it would be worthwhile to tidy up mine and add it to userscripts.org:

    http://userscripts.com/scripts/show/4250

    The cleaning function in this one is triggered whenever a DOMNodeInserted event fires, so it catches the bogus links immediately after they're implanted. At least for me, this means that I never see a singe IntelliTXT link on any afflicted site.

    I tracked down 2 other anti-IntelliTXT user scripts but, while they each work, they both use setTimeout() to trigger their IntelliTXT cleaning functions with the result that you inevitably end up seeing the double-underlined pseudolinks for a moment or two before they're nuked.