epilinks
Feb 06 '03 (Updated Feb 13 '03)
The Bottom Line All about epilinks, and nothing but epilinks.
How to include links. What epinions.com does not tell you. External links:: How to. Free sayonara link tool. The Traffic Theory.
epinions.com announcement
epinions.com announced the ability to include links in reviews on 15 January 2003. A brief message in the Member Centre points you to the updated Writing Reviews FAQ.
Experience this exciting new feature now by clicking the preceding link and read what it has to say about epilinks.
useful
You can use links anywhere in your review. You can collect links together in a links section at the end of your review, but also include them in your running text as the above paragraph does.
Epilinks are a useful feature. I’ve updated several epinions to make good use them.
Common usage of epilinks includes
• linking to related epinions
• link to the profile pages of any members you name
• linking to content in the Member Centre
• linking to a category you want to highlight
• providing unfiltered links to filtered content
FAQ
The FAQ answers several basic questions, but not all. I would have nothing to write about if it did.
The most important thing it tells you is how to include links in your reviews.
EHTML
If you know how to create hyperlinks in HTML, you’ll have no trouble creating epilinks in your reviews. Epinions.com choose to use the HTML tag for hyperlinks, just as it uses the HTML tag for bold and italics.
However, if epinions.com would really allow you to include HTML links, I could simply point you to the nearests HTML tutorial. Truth is, there are differences. Epinions.com HTML (EHTML) is similar to, but not the same as HTML. Epilinks are similar too, but not the same as HTML links.
the simple way: let epinions.com do it
It is very easy to start using epilinks in your epinions.
You can simply write
http://www.epinions.com
to have it appear as
http://epinions.com.
You can leave out the http:// part and just write
www.epinions.com.
to have it appear
http://epinions.com
• advantage and disadvantage
The obvious advantage of this method is that it is easy to use. Just copy & paste an URL, with or without the http:// part, and epinions.com will convert it into a real hyperlink for you.
A hyperlink has two main parts, the link itself and a title. A disadvantage of the simple method is that epinions.com it will always use the URL for both the link and the title. Generally, an URL does not an exciting title make.
When you copy & paste
http://www.epinions.com
into your epinion, epinions.com treats that as if you wrote
<a href="http://www.epinions.com">http://www.epinions.com</a>
for you.
the professional way: take control
You can control the title of a link by providing both the link and the link titleat the same time. To do so, just must use the HTML syntax for links. You do not need to learn everything about HTML, but you do need to write your links this way:
<a href="link">link title</a>
You must always provide a complete URL, i.e. you must include the http:// part.
• advantage and disadvantage
The disadvantage of this method is that it a bit more complex, but the advantage is that you can provide your own title, and that’s cool.
example: link to this text
Let’s say you want to include a link to this epinion in an epinion of your own.
You could easily do so by copying & pasting the URL you see in the edit box of your browser:
http://www.epinions.com/content_3096027268
If you copy paste that URL into your epinion, you’ll get a link to this text, like this:
http://www.epinions.com/content_3096027268
It looks better if you use the title of this epinion in a full hyperlink, specifying both the URL and the title
The URL is http://www.epinions.com/content_3096027268
The title is “epilinks”
If you combine those and write
<a href="http://www.epinions.com/content_3096027268">epilinks</a>
you’ll get
epilinks
and that looks considerably more professional.
WHAT EPINIONS.COM DOES NOT TELL YOU
using anchors
Follow the link titled "Writing Reviews FAQ" and notice where it takes you. It does not just take you to just that page, but it actually immediately takes you to question twelve, Question 12: Can I include links in my review?.
HTML supports anchors. Think of anchors as bookmarks inside web pages. They allow you to name a spot on a HTML page and then create links that immediately jump to that spot.
By including the name of that spot in a link, you can make a browser jump to that spot. You cannot just add the name to the page URL, you must separate the page link and the anchor name with a hash (#).
The epinions.com Writing Reviews FAQ has marked each question with a name. The name for question twelve is "012", and it is defined just above the text for question 12.
The link for the page is http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/show_~faq_writing
The name of the anchor is "012".
Therefore, the link to that spot on the page is http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/show_~faq_writing#012
other attributes
The HTML tag for hyperlinks supports many attributes, but epilinks support only the url attribute.
Try to use something else, and the epinions.com edit mode will respond with the infamous
"The following field contains unacceptable markup code (HTML)."
message.
RESTRICTIONS
only in your body
You can include links in the body of an epinion.. You cannot include links in its title, the Bottom Line or the pro or con sections.
only true epilinks
Only true epilinks, links to epinions.com will work.
You can link to anything on epinions.com, imcluding epinions, member pages, and the Member Centre.
Epinions.com does not support links to site outside epinions.com in epinions.
epinions.com deletes your title
If you write www.google.com, it will not be changed into a link to Google. More importantly, if you write
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
epinions.com will change it into
http://www.google.com
When you include a hyperlink in your epinion that epinions.com does not want to support, epinions.com includes the link as plain text and throws away the title.
That is probably not what you want. It would be better if epinions.com kept both the title and the link, for example by changing a hyperlink into the title followed by the (plain text) link between parentheses, like this: "Google (http://www.google.com)”.
Warning: Epinions.com makes this change without any warning.
preview mode
Epinions.com did not announce it, but at the same time that they introduced epilinks, they improved the preview mode. The preview mode now shows bold, shows italics and shows links.
You can click the links in preview mode to test them.
Some errors in your mark-up codes are rejected, others are accepted, but do show in the preview mode. If you miss a bold or italic closing tag, you’ll notice the unintended results immediately. If you miss the closing quote on the URL in your hyperlink, the results will be a messed up preview mode page, without the Edit button….
Try it on purpose just once, so that you will recognise the result when you make this mistake by accident. The way to get out of this situation is to use your browser’s go back button.
Everything I do in this text is fine, it just takes a lots of ampersands and semicolons. However, if I choose to edit this text and resubmit it, epinions.com will reject it. That’s epinions.com’s fault.
What epinions.com returns when you choose to edit is not the text you submitted. If you are lucky, epinions.com will reject your text, thus drawing your attention to the problem. If you are not so lucky, epinions.com may accept the text, and then show a text different from what it used to be.
You should not edit on epinions.com, but use a word processor, to copy & paste your text to epinions.com when you are ready to post it. Everytime you want to make any change, you should change your original text, and repost the entire text.
AVOIDING LINKS
how to not include links
The easiest way to avoid conversion from text to link is to use an URL that epinions.com does not support. If you write www.google.com, it will not be changed into a link to Google. But that’s today, and that policy might change tomorrow. Meanwhile, even today, every link to epinions.com is changed into a hyperlink, and that’s not always what you want.
Epinions.com does not tell how to avoid the automatic conversion of
http://://www.epinions.com
into
http://epinions.com.
That would be useful knowledge, especially when you try to write an epinion about epinions.com’s hyperlinking feature.
When epinions.com announced the hyperlinking feature, I immediately updated my most recent epinions to make good use of it. This included another epinion about epinions.com links, Unfiltered Content: all of epinions.com, all of the time. It contains what looks like epinions.com links, but aren’t. I had to update the text to protect it from possible ruin.
Avoiding conversion of URL into hyperlinks is not difficult. The simple trick is to replace some of the letters in the URL with their codes, to prevent it from being recognised as an URL. You would write www instead of www, or simply replace the dots (.) in the URL with ..
If you write
“All epinions.com URLs starts with www.epinions.com.”
you will end up with
“All epinions.com URLs start with http://www.epinions.com.”
but if you write
“All epinions.com URLs start with www.epinions.com.”
you’ll get
“All epinions.com URLs start with www.epinions.com.”
You need not worry about writing “epinions.com”. Including “epinions.com” in your text is just fine. You only risk conversion into a hyperlink if you include the “www.” part too.
EXTERNAL LINKS
restrictions
The major restrictions of epilinks are
• they can only be used in your epinions.com body
• they support only the url attribute,
• you can only include internal links, links to epinions.com
This is limiting, but not very much so. You always could and still can enjoy the full power of hyperlinks on your profile page. You always could and still can include external links as plain text.
Do remember that should not try to combine the external URL and link title into a hyperlink, as epinions.com only keep the plain-text URL and delete your title.
external link style
A good way to present external links in a link section at the end of your review is to present use a bold title, a plain-text hyperlink and a brief one-line description, each on its own line, like this:
Google
http://www.google.com
a great search engine.
You can do without the short description, especially if you have a descriptive title. You don’t need to use the bold at all. You can use italics if you prefer. Find your own personal style.
However, it really is a good idea to keep the title and the link on separate lines. That makes it easy for your readers to copy and paste the URL.
refusing internal links
When it announced the hyperlinking feature, epinoins.com immediately told us that you could not include external links. You may have tried it anyway, and found that submit procedure refuses them. It is little known that the submit procedure refuses internal links too.
There is little difference between internal and external links. They use the same syntax. The difference is that internal links always start with www..epinions.com.
Real HTML tags allow you dispense with that part. You can link to the Member Centre using either "www.epinions.com/member" or just "/member". Want to see it in action? It is a trick that epinions.com uses for the review links on your profile page.
Epinions.com does not support that abbreviated syntax for epilinks. You have to include the "www..epinions.com" part.
abbreviation
Theere is no real reason to refuse this. In fact, when you write
<a href="http://www.epinions.com">http://www.epinions.com</a>
epinions.com will display
<a href="/">http://www.epinions.com</a>
Epinions demands that you use www..epinions.com when you write your epilinks, but the generated page will always contain the abbreviated version. This makes the refusal to allow abbreviated links seem like a silly one.
It isn’t so silly though. I believe that that the abbreviation only occurs on epinions.com, as an optimisation of the actual page generation. Real abbreviation of the links in the stored content would break the links. If epinions.com really stripped the http://www..epinions.com, all epilinks would stop working when the licensed content appears on a third party web site, but when you use full links, all epinions.com links will continue to work, even the sayonara links.
broken links
Broken links do not look professional. Epinions.com has always avoided breaking links to epinions.com. When epinions.com introduced epinions.com 2.0, with a different system for URLs, it kept all the existing reviews URLs. However, broken links remain unavoidable. For example, if you link to an epinion that has been deleted, your link is broken. Oh, the link will work, but you’ll end up on epinions.com’s "We’re sorry ,but the review has been deleted" page.
refusing external links
Epinions.com distinguishes between internal and external links in your epinions. It allows internal links and changes external links into plain-text URLs.
Epinions.com makes the distinction by looking for the “www..epinions.com” part. Links to www.epinions.com are shown as desired, links to other sites are filtered out.
Yet, as some people noticed, I did post epinions with links to external sites. The double feature on the storm flood disaster of 1953 and the Delta Works, both posted on 1 Feb 2003, somehow do include working links to external sites.
profile page
Epinions.com allows you to specify up to three URL as your favourite web sites. You can always include more links on your real profile. If you list google.com as one of your favourite web sites, the actual URL on your profile page isn’t
http://www.google.com
it is
http://www.epinions.com/sayonara.html/destin_~ http://www.google.com
instead.
sayonara links
If you click that link, you will arrive at www.google.com. It definitely acts like an external link, but it isn’t. It is a link to www.epinions.com. It is an internal link. The links in those two epinions are links like that.
Technically, these links are internal links, but practically, they are external links.
I’ll call them sayonara links.
sayonara syntax
There are two ways to do sayonara links to Google:
http://www.epinions.com/sayonara.html/destin_~ http://www.google.com
and
http://www.epinions.com/sayonara.html?destin=http://www.google.com
There seems to be no reason to prefer one syntax over the other. I find the second syntax easier to memorise, but epinions.com provides a free tool to create the first one.
freel tool
The sayonara link for Google certainly isn’t as straigthforward as a direct link to Google. In fact, it looks a bit daunting. There are two http:// parts, and there are unusual character characters, such as the underscore (_) and the tilde (~). It is easy to forget or misplace a character. Luckily, you don’t need to remember the sayonara syntax at all.
Creating sayonara links is not difficult. Epinions.com has thoughtfully provided you with a free tool to create up to three at once them in three easy steps: the favourite links on your profile page. Here’s how you use your profile page to create sayonara links:
0. Choose to edit your profile page
1. Copy and paste the URL and the title in one pair of favourite links boxes and save your profile
2. View your public or private profile to see the sayonara link. Click the link to confirm that it works
3. Right-click the link to view its properties (or view the page source) and copy the full URL
DISCUSSION
sayonara
Sayonara is Japanese for goodbye. The sayonara.html page is epinions.com’s goodbye page. It is used for links on your profile page, but also for links to merchants. Those merchant linkare considerably more complex and longer. In fact, many are so long that if try and paste them into your epinions, epinions.com will refuse your epinion simply because it contains a word that’s too long.
codes
The sayonara page is an essential part of epinions.com. It is the epinions.com gateway for links to external sites.
Those long merchant links seem to contain various codes. It is a fair guess that epinions.com probably uses these codes for bookkeeping purposes. You may be able to figure out what these codes mean if you want to, but I strongly advise against experimenting with it. You might be interfering with the site’s proper bookkeeping, and epinions.com is likely to take a very dim view of such actions.
not necessary
The fairly simple syntax used on your profile page does not contain any codes. That epinions.com uses the saynora syntax at all is even a bit puzzling. Without codes, the sayonara syntax used there can merely tracks that a visitor left epinions.com, but epinions.com does not need the sayonara page to do so.
Epinions.com could simply track the fact that a link has been clicked, and if epinions.com really wants to follow visitor behaviour, it should (and perhaps does) do so. After all, you are remain free to include any normal link on your profile page in addition to your three epinions.com favourites.
There is no real difference.
There is a practical difference. An external link that you provide as your favourite is a direct external link, whereas the link epinions.com presents to the visitors of your page is an internal link. You are allowed to use internal links in your epinions…
CAT AND MOUSE
Objectionable Word Filter
Epinions.com has always had an Objectionable Word Filter, and it has always been possible to beat it. File13 revealed out how to beat the epinions.com 1.x filter. When epinions.com introduced epinions.com 2.0, it also introduced a new Objectionable Word Filter. The new filter wasn’t fooled by the trick used to beat the epinions.com 1.x filter.
When I revealed how to beat the epinions.com 2.x Objectionable Word Filter (OWF) epinions.com did not update the filter again. They let it be.
I can think of several reasons for this. The impact of that editorial is limited in scope. Only a few hundred of the more than one million members have read that editorial. Most members remain unaware of it, and there is a good chance that if epinions.com were to update the filter, someone would figure out how to beat it again.
Epinions has updated the user agreement. You are not allowed to post material that contains profanity, vulgarity, hate speech or threats of violence, and you are not allowed to submit content that is reasonably likely to offend a person looking for information on the product or topic you’re posting under.
The current situation seems a reasonable middle-ground. The filter keeps most garbage out, yet those that really want to include particular words can find out how to do so.
unfiltered epinions.com
When I revealed how to view filtered content, epinions.com did not change things either.
Again, only a few hundred members read the editorial. Moreover, old epinions.com content can be found in the Internet archive, the Google cache, and even on the sites of its business partners, such as half.com.
sayonara
Now, when I posted my double feature, I merely used some sayonara links. Some members noticed, but I was not drawing lots of attention to it. This editorial was not finished at all and had not been posted yet.
I updated a few other epinions. Meanwhile, epinions.com updated the submit process. I tried to update my Palm Tungsten|T review with a link to the Palm audio patch, and found that I couldn’t do so anymore. Worse, by choosing to update the epinion, all existing sayonara links were converted to plain-text sayonara URLs.
epinions.com beat me to it!; epinions.com updated the submit process even before I finished this editorial to tell you about epinions.com’s accidental sayonara linking feature.
It seems that, as far as epinions.com is concerned, we can say sayonara to sayonara linking. Thus, the epinions I mentioned make a rather unique use of this accidental feature. If you try to use the same technique I used there today, you’ll find that it does not work anymore.
Note that epinions.com seems to be taking the same stance as with the improved Objectionable Word Filter, namely, if our filters allowed publication of your text, they allowed publication of your text, so be it. However, you’ll have to pass our updated filters when you want update your text. That stance makes a lot of sense and does seem their wisest course.
defeating the trick
Defeating the sayonara linking was very easy for epinions.com. Epinions.com decided to not only check for www.epinions.com, but check for www.epinions.com/sayonara.html as well. It can not get much easier.
There’s nothing wrong with the sayonara links epinions.com’s free tool generates (or the other syntax either), but the URL filter has been updated to recognise the sayonara links and treat them the same as it treats real external links. When it recognises a sayonara link, it keeps only the plain-text URL. If all your readers are going to see is a plain-text URL, it’s better to use the direct link than the sayonara link.
no more external links?
Does this mean the end of the external linking fun? Of course not!
It took me about one second to beat the improved URL filter. I did manage to update the Palm Tungsten|T review with another useful link.
However, it is again not too difficult for epinions.com to improve their URL filtering. That does not matter much, because I found yet another filter hole. Then again, that too, can be plugged quite easily.
plugging holes
If we play this cat and mouse game for a while, the unavoidable outcome is that epinions.com wins. There are just so many tricks you can think of, and epinions.com doesn’t have to do any thinking at all; epinions.com can simply plug every filter hole you find, until all holes have been plugged.
It is still possible to use sayonara links today, 6 Feb 2003. We can still have some external linking fun, but once a hole is known, it can be plugged, and if you try updating your epinion after that, you will loose the sayonara links you had.
why?
It isn’t so clear why epinions.com would want to block links to external sites. The few reviews linked to below demonstrate how useful such links can be, how they allow us to submit even better content.
Sure, it allows us to submit worse content too, but epinions.com created the WOT to combine with ratings to solve just that problem.
Epinions.com should not try to block us from using external links. Au contraire. Epinions.com should allow us to use any link we like.
Epinions.com can monitor the links visitors click to recognise links to its participating merchants. Epinions.com can obtain valuable information by analysing which user-provided links visitors click most. Allowing links may enable epinions.com to discover opportunities, such as new merchants or topics to write about, that it does not recognise today.
traffic theory
It is clear why epinions.com introduced links to epinions.com content; epinions.com wants links to epinions.com to appear on the sites it licenses its content too.
Remember that Member Centre announcement that half.com using epinions.com content, and epinions.com not getting paid for it? Epinions.com is understandably underexcited about that original deal, but has found a way to sweeten it. Epinions.com is going to make half.com pay - by flooding half.com with links to epinions.com.
By distributing content with links back to epinions.com, epinions.com is going to make business partners generate traffic to our reviews on epinions.com. Let’s take a poll. Anyone against this cunning plan, please raise your right hand? Hm, I thought so.
More links to epinions.com is good news for our hit counts. However, I doubt that the epinions.com partners that license their content from epinions.com will look favourable upon this tactic. They monitor their traffic too. When they notice a remarkable increase in the outflow to epinions.com, they’ll look into it. When they find out how it came about, they’ll may get upset enough with this particular epinions.com tactic to give epinions.com a choice between either allowing epinions.com writers to link to all web sites, or discontinuing the content contract.
SUMMARY
Epinions.com doesn’t stress that titles in external links are destroyed and doesn’t tell you that
• the only supported attribute is the url attribute
• you can use anchors in URLs
• the edit/preview mode cycle does not return what you put in
• you can test your links in preview mode
• you cannot use abbreviated links
• you can avoid having your URL turned into links
It is possible to link to external sites. Epinions.com tries to block you from linking to external sites by filtering your URLs. Their first attempts to do so failed and we can still use sayonara links today, but the linking fun isn’t likely to last long if epinions.com really wants to stop it.
I don’t think epinions.com should try to stop it, I think epinions.com should encourage it – and epinions.com’s business partners may agree. On that hopeful thought, I say sayonara.
LINKS
Objectionable Words Filter (OWF): Not Helpful
Everything you need to know about the Objectionable Words Filter.
Unfiltered Content: all of epinions.com, all of the time
You can choose to view filtered content. This epinion tells you how.
• real bullets • “true quotes” • ellipsis and… • actual sex symbols! •
Codes for the most common and a few uncommon characters.
How to include mark-up codes in your reviews
Includes tip on how to find mark-up code errors using the preview mode.
SAYONARA LINKS
Palm m550: Tungsten|T is a great little Palm with a few design flaws
Detailed Tungsten|T review. Includes most helpful links to support and update pages.
Palm Ultra-Thin Keyboard: small, light and pocketable, but not perfect
Review of Palm Ultra-Thin Keyboard. Includes most helpful links to manufacturer and driver download pages.
Luctor et Emergo
The storm flood disaster of 1953.
Dutch Mountains: The Eighth Wonder of the World
The Delta Works.
A double feature on the storm flood disaster of 1953 and the Delta Works, posted on February 1, 2003.
Both texts include sayonara links to sites of interest.
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Epinions.com ID:
mobiprof
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 - Top 100 |
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Location: In the Dutch Mountains
Reviews written: 180
Trusted by: 542 members
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