Anyone having problems with a redicrect to vindicosuite?
A couple of people have commented that they’ve been having problems with this blog—or links on this blog—redirecting them to a site known as vindicosuite. I did some research on this, and apparently this blog is not the only one are having this difficulty and it seems to have something to do with sitemeter. Sitemeter has been the traffic counter here for years and years and has done a good job, and I’m loathe to remove it and start looking for a substitute unless this continues.
Here’s an article that explains what’s probably going on. Another site indicate that it also may be occurring more on computers that don’t have adblocker.
So my question is: how many of you are having problems with this (and do you have adblocker), how long has it been happening, and how often? When it happens, does it stop you from coming here, or can you get around it?
I don’t seem to be having any such problem and I don’t have an ad blocker.
I don’t seem to be having any problems, but I do have an ad blocker.
No problems here but I did see Patterico had this same problem a few days ago also and he mentioned the removal of Sitemeter as the fix.
I had no problems with either the Opera, Pale Moon, or Epic browsers. I tested Opera and Pale Moon both with and without Adblock. Epic has a similar plug-in built into the browser.
Unfortunately, this kind of problem is so common, and this kind of testing is so hard to evaluate, that “for what it’s worth” is now regularly shortened to FWIW.
Sorry, I haven’t heard anything about this particular issue.
Never saw it.
Recently, I have had a few failures to see a site you have linked to. I have no ad blocker.
I experienced it for a few days. Took me to a garden website with nothing on it or twice to MySpace. I don’t use an ad blocker. My browser is Kindle Fire Silk.
There has been no redirection today so I’ve returne to read your blog. I rarely comment. 😉
I must add I never noticed being redirected to vindicosuite.
I’ve had no problems with your site, and yes, I do have an ad blocker.
For me, the vindicosuite redirect started in April (here at NeoNeocon, and at Patterico).
The problem at THIS site stopped when I added
s10.sitemeter.com
and
b10.sitemeter.com
to my hosts file (sending lookups for that location to the “localhost” IP address of 127.0.0.1)
The solution for Patterico was to add
b17.sitemeter.com
and
s17.sitemeter.com
to the hosts file.
Haven’t had a problem since.
I do have Adblock. I have not experienced the redirect.
No issues with a redirect, and I do have an ad blocker.
It hasn’t happened to me here. btw since you’re using WordPress you can always use their Jetpack to count visits.
I have stopped going to many sites because after I call them up there is a significant frozen period when I can’t page down to keep reading while down in the lower left corner I see the dozens of sites the page is hitting in order to have all the dancing bears and clown cars do their thing.
No problems on my iPad.
Yet.
(I haven’t run into the issue you mention.)
This sort of thing is hardly new.
The telephone stepping switch (that allowed dialing of phone numbers, as opposed to call the operator, and have her connect you) was invented by an undertaker in Argentina who found out that a competitor was paying the operator to redirect calls to the competitor.
Don’t they mention statcounter as an alternative?
https://statcounter.com/
I’ve had it a number of times. Also redirects to gogardenclub.com and myspace.com. I figured it had to do with Site Meter, because I’d had the same problem with Site Meter on my own blog. It started with redirects to myspace, which apparently now has some kind of connection with Site Meter. My solution was to remove the sitemeter code from my site, and I’ve not seen the problem since. I haven’t missed it much because the stats provided by Typepad (where my blog is hosted), though less informative than Site Meter’s, are adequate to tell me roughly how much traffic I have, which is all I really care about now (I used to enjoy seeing where visitors were located, etc.).
I’m using Chrome on Windows 7 with no ad blocker, btw.
Yep. On the outdated IE browser on the computer at work and on my Chromebook at home. Gogardenclub is a site that pops up on the Chromebook. Among others. The popup blocker doesn’t work on it. On the outdated IE, the computer locks up.
When the Healthcare.gov site did not have the form to apply for an authorization number used to apply for an exemption the the “Shared Responsibility Fee”, I searched for the form in other places. First site redirected me to Vindico and took over the Mac. Then it took over my PC. A computer shop told me neither machine had any virus, rather it was in my modem. New modem fixed it.
Oh, forgot to answer the other questions:
How long? Not sure, several months. How often? Not very, maybe one out of ten page loads. Usually seems to happen only on initial visit to the site. Does it stop me from coming here? No, I am made of sterner stuff. Workaround? Just kill the offending page and reload neoneocon–this time I don’t get the redirect.
I don’t know how it would work, but from the behavior it seems to be triggered only once per visit. I.e. if I go to neoneocon.com for the first time in a day or so, I may get it. If I hang around for a bit moving from one page to another to read comments, etc., I don’t get it again. Site trackers have to define a bit imprecisely what constitutes a “visit” vs. multiple page loads in one visit.
Some other readers mentioning MySpace reminded me that I did have MySpace show up a few times and wondered why. I didn’t connect it to your website, but it may have happened when I was visiting. However, it hasn’t happened for a few days now. Also, I forgot to mention that my browser is IE7, I think.
No problems, I’m currently using the Pale Moon browser.
I had this problem on Monday afternoon, using my Mac laptop (Chrome browser). I kept getting redirected to gogardenclub.com. I stopped visiting your site for the day and at work this week on my Toshiba Laptop I have not had any problems.
I have not seen this on my PCs or my iPad, but I did see this a few times when checking in with my Android phone. I’m usually using IE on the PCs (v 9 and 11 in recent times) and Safari on the iPad – don’t believe I have adblocker on any of them.
I live in an apartment that furnishes wifi. Several months ago we got a new and improved system with a blocker. Since then I can access neoneo,con but if I try to follow links they’re blocked. I can’t even contact neo by e-mail as that’s blocked too. The message says the links go to http://x.vindicosuite.com which is full of viruses and addware. When I notified neo of this she replied none of her links go there so I informed management of that and I haven’t heard back from them. IT is an outside source, so it might take a while.
I have AdBlock, and also no problems with vindicosuite.
I was redirected to gogardenclub.com for several days but not lately. It wasn’t just your site but another as well.
Firefox 38.0.1
I forgot to mention this only happens with this site. Links on other sites work just fine. Being a longtime fan of neo, I use this site daily and miss the information I used to get from the links.
Mac and Neo, I hope you don’t mind, but I just cut/pasted/linked this over on outsidethebeltway.com, which has been having the same problems the past week.
I haven’t had them happen on this site yet.
I have not had trouble with your site, but with many others including instapundit. I believe I have fixed it by changing the DNS that my router uses from the default provided to a more secure one like OpenDNS or the one from Norton or Google.
The redirect is definitely a sitemeter problem. After I removed the code from my site, the number of unique visits increased by 30% over night and has remained at the level for the last two weeks.
There may be no connection between the removed code and the increased visits but it sure looks that way.
ed in texas Says:
May 21st, 2015 at 7:47 am
…was invented by an undertaker in Argentina…
USA! USA! USA!
1892 – Almon Strowger, the St. Louis undertaker, became upset on finding that the wife of a competitor was a telephone operator who made his line busy and transferred calls meant for him to her husband. “Necessity is the mother of invention” so Strowger developed the dial telephone system to get the operator out of the system. He forms a Chicago firm, Automatic Electric, to manufacture step-by-step central office equipment (which is now owned by GTE). The first automatic C.O. was installed in LaPorte, Indiana. I discovered in Ralph Meyer’s book, Old Time Telephones, that actually, in 1879, Connelly, Connelly and McTighe patented an automatic dial system, although they did not commercialize it.
You ve function just the way you always have in my case, neo.
Haven’t been redirected from this site but a couple of others are sending me to “http://gogardenclub.com” where I receive a “503: Service unavailable” error.
I haven’t had any problems. I’m not using AdBlocker, but I’m using the Epic Privacy Browser, which blocks ads by default.
Thank you, thank you, thank you – for putting up this post.
I thought it was my machine going crazy. It was constantly going to a MySpace page, again, and again. On your blog and others as well.
It only did it with blogs so after I ran an anti-virus checker several times I figured it might have to do with something on the blogs.
Nope, never have – But I do have AdBlocker. It does do a count when I link to another website from this page if that actually means anything.
I guess if browser’s may come into play – I use Opera.
I saw these redirects happening on one of my clients pages and since I had no plugins on but had installed sitemeter, it was easy to see who the culprit was. A webmaster has written about it here http://ub2server.com/redirects-to-vindicosuite-com-and-its-solution.html