website redirect (?) as scrolling down

[JeenLeen]

This is not a fear of a virus, but a complaint about something I reckon some websites do and asking if it can be prevented easily.

While at work, I clicked a link about something going on at Github. Tech article, so it seemed fine to read at work. At the bottom of the article, another article started, but the next one was about adult entertainment.
I stopped reading and was about to leave the page, and I saw the URL was the title of the adult entertainment article, not the page I linked to. After some worry about if IT was going to flag it, I scrolled up and saw that the URL changed as I scrolled the webpage. (I think I can defend what happened easily enough if I get called on it -- the article was safe for work, just about NSFW stuff, and I got to it literally by accident after reading a tech article... but still worrisome.)

I knew some places loaded new articles if you scrolled down after finishing an old one, but I hadn't ever realized it was loading a new webpage without any noticable redirect or requiring you to click a link. Is this common in places like that?
(I think Cracked.com does that now, and some Collegehumor pages do the 'load as scroll down' thing, but I'm at work and not willing to risk those websites to check.)

EDIT: here's the tech article I originally went to. (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywen8x/13000-projects-ditched-github-for-gitlab-monday-morning)

[Bohandas]

Yeah, I hate those kinds of sites. You can stop it by disabling javascript. But this may also disable half the article because sometimes the article itself is multiple different pages.

I imagine that either 1.) the site designers are completely stupid and/or 2.) There is some sinister reason behind it, like they're running a potentially unwanted script and don't want you to turn js off

[gomipile]

Eh. The same tech is used in a benign manner, as well. Ars Technica uses it for their two and three page articles now, for instance. It's a technique, a tool. It's neither good nor bad, but can be used in good or bad ways.

[Alent]

The trick here is that you aren't actually being redirected, you're still on the first page you visited. Your traffic log on the IT side should not see anything but the first url you clicked.

There are two things at play here, two technical, one psychological.

The technical:

What happens is that when you get near the bottom, a Javascript function reaches out and appends the next article beneath what you were reading. When your scrollbar passes a terminator, another script changes your URL display value so that if you click a link in the second article then click back, your browser tells the site "I need (second article's url)" and you arrive at the second article you were reading when you clicked the link, instead of the first article you've already finished.

I had to implement this functionality on a site I built for someone recently- it uses a tabbed layout to organize large collections of PDFs, and the client wanted the correct tab to be selected if someone clicked on a PDF and then clicked back.

The second technical reason is that iOS devices don't have back buttons, so single page sites are supposedly more user friendly to iOS users on mobile data. I don't quite know if I buy that, but I know the single page sites I've tested on iOS users got positive feedback, so... there's at least something to it.

The Psychological:

People are more likely to read a second/third article- and thus see a second or third set of ads that register as "new" views to the ad company- if they don't have to click a link. It's a simple bid for your time, one that's easily resisted once you know what's going on.

My experience has been that aggressive adblockers will deal with the more dishonest flavors of this trick, while still letting the more good natured uses of it slide. I reserve noscript for the bad actors with JS Cryptominers and the like.

[Bohandas]

The trick here is that you aren't actually being redirected, you're still on the first page you visited. Your traffic log on the IT side should not see anything but the first url you clicked.

There are two things at play here, two technical, one psychological.

The technical:

What happens is that when you get near the bottom, a Javascript function reaches out and appends the next article beneath what you were reading. When your scrollbar passes a terminator, another script changes your URL display value so that if you click a link in the second article then click back, your browser tells the site "I need (second article's url)" and you arrive at the second article you were reading when you clicked the link, instead of the first article you've already finished.

I had to implement this functionality on a site I built for someone recently- it uses a tabbed layout to organize large collections of PDFs, and the client wanted the correct tab to be selected if someone clicked on a PDF and then clicked back.

The second technical reason is that iOS devices don't have back buttons, so single page sites are supposedly more user friendly to iOS users on mobile data. I don't quite know if I buy that, but I know the single page sites I've tested on iOS users got positive feedback, so... there's at least something to it.

But sometimes an individual article contains redirects like this. Why not just put the whole article on one page

[halfeye]

Why not just put the whole article on one page
Where would the fun be in that? Much too useful.

[Alent]

But sometimes an individual article contains redirects like this. Why not just put the whole article on one page

I think you will find a comment about pageviews and adds slightly below what you quoted. :smallfrown:

There are some legit reasons you'd want to make your articles multipage, tho', they make it harder for robots to copy/paste your articles onto someone else's site. There's a pretty dirty side of SEO that clones content onto hacked wordpress blogs and adds links to the site they're trying to boost in an effort to try to deceive google and such into rating the site they're boosting higher.