[Ext] Clean Links 2.4

[MC Fat Tongue]

Hi Diego,

Thank you for the continuing updates to clean links.

I'm using Firefox 24.0 and Clean Links 2.4.4

I have noticed one particular problem, I use the VTzilla add-on in Firefox, which is the Virus Total scanner used to scan links for viruses and malware.

The way the add-on should work is you right click a link and select scan with virus total, it should go to the virus total page and perform the scan. When clean links is on and you right click and select scan with virus total, it just jumps straight to the link and does not do the scan. This is particularly dangerous because you might be going to an infected page.

This problem occurs on some wed sites and not on others. One place this does occur is on Google search results links. In this example I did a search in Google for Star Trek, and right clicked the first result (http://www.startrek.com) and chose scan with Virus Total (Clean Links was turned on), it went straight to the page without scanning.

When I turned off Clean Links and right clicked and scanned http://www.startrek.com it correctly goes to this page https://www.virustotal.com/en-gb/url/su ... rtrek.com/ to scan the link.

When Clean Link is on it is incorrectly stripping out something from the virustotal.com link in the example above, that makes it jump straight to the page. I tried to copy the incorrectly cleaned link as well but it was too quick for me as it jumped straight to the page in the link.

Virus Total is an important weapon in my security arsenal so I would be most grateful if you would take a look at this for me.

Thank you.

Edit: I have added www.virustotal.com to skip domains in the options, and this seems to have solved the problem. Was that the correct thing to do?

[diegocr]

Edit: I have added www.virustotal.com to skip domains in the options, and this seems to have solved the problem. Was that the correct thing to do?

Yeah, exactly. In any case, i'll add virustotal to the whitelisted sites by default for the next version.

[MC Fat Tongue]

Thanks Diego, and much obliged.

[joleg74]

Hello Diego.

So it happened again. I can't quite put a finger on what triggered it, but copying text from FF stopped working. It stopped even though CleanLink was "disabled" from the action bar.
However, unchecking CopyLink Controller from the options fixed the situation.
Some more info I can give you: when the problem was present, when right clicking on highlighted text, it took a "very long" (~1 second) for the context menu to show up. When CopyLink Controller is disabled and/or when there's no problem with copy/pasting, the context menu shows up instantly.
I also just noticed that re-enabling CopyLink Controller does not bring back the problem. So I guess unchecking/rechecking CopyLink Controller clears some state and bring back the broken functionality.
I hope this helps you narrow down the source of the problem.

Cheers!

[MC Fat Tongue]

Diego,

Just to let you know the copy, paste, problem that joleg74 is experiencing does not occur for me. The copy paste function has always behaved as it should throughout all versions of Clean Links, ever since I started using it.

Windows 7 64
Firefox 24.0
Clean Links 2.4.4

[joleg74]

Question about the functioning of the plugin itself:

Is it expected from the plugin to cull extra stuff from a link (e.g. umt_.*)?
I ask because I have the Use Redirect Watcher option turned on, and when I clicked on this link:
http://t.co/COLd16g6OV

I end up here:
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/11/us-gov ... um=twitter

(notice the utm_source and utm_medium tags/variables/whatever-you-call-'em in the resulting url).

Could it be because of multiple redirections?
As I understand, http://t.co/COLd16g6OV redirects to http://dlvr.it/470Mrk which ultimately redirects to http://boingboing.net/2013/10/11/us-gov ... um=twitter

Though I must say that accessing http://dlvr.it/470Mrk directly from the address bar still opens the URL containing the utm_ tags...

Does anyone know why that is?

Cheers!

joce.

[diegocr]

Thanks MC

Joleg74, i did some further checks with Event Delegation turned on and off (just in case) over imdb and wasn't able to reproduce the problem yet, could you please check if there is some error reported in the browser console when that happens? (ctrl+shift+J) - Just realized if a error is throw in the controller it'd stop working, but that would be using "Copy Link Location" rather than just "Copy"

In any case, i think i could just completely turn off the controller when disabling the add-on through its toolbar button.

[diegocr]

Question about the functioning of the plugin itself:

Is it expected from the plugin to cull extra stuff from a link (e.g. umt_.*)? ...snip...

Joleg74, clicking both of these links (t.co & dlvr.it) here, the utm stuff is properly removed:

[22:33:26.818] GET http://t.co/COLd16g6OV [HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 344ms]
[22:33:27.154] GET http://dlvr.it/470Mrk [HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently 499ms]
[22:33:27.649] GET http://boingboing.net/2013/10/11/us-gov ... inent.html [HTTP/1.1 200 OK 593ms]

That's starting to be quite strange. Could it be some other add-on you have installed is weirdly conflicting with CL?

[joleg74]

Curiouser and curiouser... Hum.
The previous errors were seen on my work PC. I just tried that on my PC at home and lo and behold, the URL is properly cleaned. Excuse my French, but WTF?
I can try and see if there's a correlation between "copy broken" and "url not cleaned"... :-/ (I don't think there is).
As for other plugins interfering, it's not impossible. I have quite a few plugins (20+) installed.

[diegocr]

Feel free to try CL alone and check if these probs still occur, then disable add-on by add-on until you find the culprit. You know, at one of those moments when you're bored at the office

[w8sdz]

I just installed Clean Links Version 2.4.4. When a link is cleaned it is rewritten but has a "#" after the final /. Example http://newsite.com/#

This seems to happen on very cleaned URL that I have tried. Is there a way to remove the extraneous "#"?

[diegocr]

Hi Keith,

That hash-tag is used because some sites adds a counter to links stating the number of times you moved the mouse over them. Thus, it ensures the link is clickable in case such counter is added after it has been cleared by the add-on, otherwise it'd cause a 404 error.

This does not happens using Event Delegation mode, since links are cleaned on-the-fly when clicked.

Cheers.

[MC Fat Tongue]

Hello Diego,

I use a Firefox add-on called myibidder which is a bid sniper program I use on eBay, but it doesn't work unless you add http://www.myibidder.com to Skip Domains in options.

Would you please be kind enough to add it to Skip Domains by default.

Thank you.

[diegocr]

Hi Mc,

Well, to be fair that isn't like virustotal, in fact i didn't hear of that site before and therefore i don't feel comfortable whitelisting a domain by default which most users wouldn't benefit from it, sorry.

I know you reinstall CL from scratch on every release, but i think you can stop doing that. Version 2.4.5 (released a couple of days ago, btw) adds a new "Reset Options" button you can use to achieve the same than reinstalling, which should be easier than using PrefMon's eCleaner (if that's how you was doing it)

In any case, you won't need to do that with every version. The release notes will point out when the default options are changed.

Cheers.

[MC Fat Tongue]

That's perfectly understandable, thanks anyway Diego.