All is fair in Love and URL redirects

I'm guessing this does happen in the world of e-commerce...?

[ronin]

This underhand practice is (I'm guessing) less common in the sphere of party politics, though I imagine there must be no shortage of it in the commercial sphere.

Some of you in other places around the world might be aware that on this tired, jealous, petty, post-imperial island the ruling classes are (once again) squabbling over who gets to be Head Prefect.

One of the candidates, Nadhim Zahawi is using NZ4PM as his social media hashtag or "campaign shorthand" (or something).

Anyway, for a laugh, point your browser at nz4pm.com (I'm not writing out the link because I don't want to be mistaken for someone who endorses more years of Late-stage Feudalism).

Surely there must be more of this sort of thing out there? Especially in the sphere of e-commerce?

Does anyone know of examples of URLs which the public might reasonably type in with the intention of finding out more about a company, only to find themselves redirected to a direct competitor?

[engine]

Redirects became very popular in the early days, especially for marketing purposes, but then got abused, and then became bad form.

In that instance, it makes sense to redirect because of the situation, but, of course, it's not for ranking purposes.

I've used it myself over time.

In recent times i've seen it used for specific product brands, although I haven't seen many of late.

[ronin]

In that instance, it makes sense to redirect because of the situation

Note that the redirect to Mordaunt's campaign pre-dates Zahawi's withdrawal from the race.

Unless there's evidence to the contrary, this was an unambiguous case of opportunistic type-in-jacking.

[lucy24]

I remember discovering a couple years ago that, given {short phrase associated with one political figure}, if I followed the obvious guess and typed in {that same phrase dot com} I would end up at a site clearly supporting a competitor. I can't now remember if it was a redirect or content served at the original name. Good move, though.

The lesson to be learned is: If you are planning to associate a particular phrase or even a random string of letters with your political identity or other public position, first make sure to snabble all domains that might reasonably use that name element.

As I type this, I remembered a rather more hilarious recent example, where {public figure} actually claimed to have a website called {short phrase dot com} ... only they never got around to activating the site. That is, the domain name has in fact been registered, but there is no website attached to it. (In this specific case, I can think of several explanations, each funnier--and more plausible--than the last.)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Thankfully there's the wayback machine, though I've not checked if it could crawl this site.

Their redir is a JS redirect. If you disable JS nothing happens, you end up with a broken countdown. You'd think the intelligentsia of our country could've done a meta refresh instead eh!

Ironically when I posted this the post-submission screen says 'this page requires javascript'. But it was posted.

[ronin]

The plot thickens.

When I looked at the site yesterday, I think it was on my second visit that I noted it stated:

An anonymous Penny Mordaunt supporter

and concluded this was an unauthorised partisan act from a third-party rather than an officially-sanctioned action by an officer in Mordaunt's campaign.

But I've noticed today - and I'm dead sure this wasn't there yesterday - the website now also states:

Disclaimer: This website does not belong to Penny Mordaunt or the Penny Mordaunt campaign.
Just to be clear, Penny is not to blame for this and it has nothing to do with her. Remember to buy your domains, Nadhim.

Almost as if the anonymous author now realises the risk that such underhand tactics might generate adverse publicity and wants to frame the type-in-jacking as a friendly word to the wise.

I'm going to guess this is a cut and paste job.

There's no CMS cruft at at all - it's impressively lean - so it could be handwritten.

But I'm not convinced it's handwritten on two counts:

1) Why the weird indenting?

2) Why would the author use arrow function syntax (from ES2015+ / Modern JS) to write out the callback inside the setInterval method but then declare all variables with var instead of using a const for the DOM node and declaring the timeout variable with a let?

Note to self: Time to get out more and find some new hobbies...