Boy, I’ve gone around and around on this one, so please forgive me if this is still not the appropriate place for this. Feel free to point me in the right direction, or straight to hell, if that is more suitable…but here’s the thing…
I use Thunderbird to read RSS feeds from many sites, most notably theCHIVE, and when I read a new message from their feed (for example http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/feedburner/ZdSV/~3/3DMhCjetspI/), it forces open a new browser window (in my default browser, Firefox, not in Thunderbird itself) and loads https://twitter.com/i/jot, a 1x1 pixel gif image.
This has also happened on a few other sites, but it is most reliably reproducible on theCHIVE (http://www.thechive.com/) and its sister site theBERRY (http://theberry.com/) from their RSS feed when read in Thunderbird.
I have finally traced it to a line of code in the Twitter share button that calls http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Here’s the line:
h=“twttr_”,i={tweetbutton:"//p.twitter.com/t.gif",followbutton:"//p.twitter.com/f.gif",tweetembed:"//p.twitter.com/e.gif"},j=[“hask”,“li”,“logged_in”,“pid”,“user_id”,e.guest_id_cookie,h+“hask”,h+“li”,h+e.guest_id_cookie],k=0,l,m,n=[],o,p,q,r,s="https://twitter.com/i/jot";e.forceNewCookie(),a({enqueue:y,flush:z,initPostLogging:t,addPixel:u,addLegacyPixel:v,addVar:w})})});
I don’t know enough javascript to know how to stop this behavior, whether it is a twitter widget issue, or a website-using-the-widget issue, or whether I am the only person in the world who has been irritated enough by this strange behavior to go so far to track it down, but if some bright twitter API wizard could take a look at it and give me some (ANY!) information, I’d really appreciate it. If I could make it stop altogether without resorting to editing my hosts file to block any and all traffic from twitter.com, it would be a far more favorable solution!
