Nuked Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts! It’s Nuked, your funny guy who loves all things technology. Today, I’ve got an interesting and slightly bizarre story to share with you about a bug that Reddit has been dealing with. Brace yourselves, because this bug involves slurs being added to Reddit URLs, and it’s causing quite a stir.
So, here’s what’s been happening. One of the staffers at The Verge was innocently Googling something related to a lighthearted debate in our Slack channel when they stumbled upon some Reddit links with unexpected characters and a slur in the subdomain. Can you believe it? The URLs looked something like this: https://2goback-[f-word].reddit.com/r/[rest of the URL]. But despite the additional characters, the link still took them to Reddit (although it had the Old Reddit layout).
And guess what? This slur-filled phenomenon wasn’t limited to just one query. A site search on Google for the subdomain revealed a bunch of links from different subreddits that had the same issue. Yep, it was widespread. Some eagle-eyed Redditors also noticed this strange occurrence over the past day or so. We decided to do some further investigation and discovered that you can even change the word after “2goback-” in the subdomain with other words, and the URLs will still work. Talk about weird!
Now, hold on a second. Before you start panicking, let me assure you that this slur doesn’t pop up on every Reddit-related query. I’ve only seen it when my colleague stumbled upon that specific query and when I intentionally searched for the inappropriate URL on both Reddit and Google. So, in my regular browsing, Reddit links show up as normal.
Curious about what Reddit had to say about this whole mess, we reached out to their spokesperson, Courtney Geesey-Dorr. She confirmed that Reddit is aware of the issue and assured us that it’s just a bug. Phew! Here’s what she had to say:
“We became aware of a bug, a week or two ago, that allows any words and phrases to be updated and manipulated on a post page hyperlink that leads back to Reddit. We’re working with the appropriate partners on a fix. For context, we’ve found that Google will index URLs that work that it finds, both on and off platform, so if someone shared a link on another platform to one of those arbitrary URLs, Google will crawl and index it, even if we don’t’officially’ support it.”
Oh, and we didn’t forget about Google. We reached out to them too, and their spokesperson, Jennifer Kutz, had this to say:
“This issue appears to be related to a configuration issue on Reddit that makes it possible to create alternative URLs for Reddit content. On Search, we aim not to surprise anyone with content that wasn’t explicitly searched for, and we’ll look into ways to prevent this issue from occurring in the future.”
Well, folks, let’s hope that Reddit and Google can sort out this bug soon. In the meantime, stay vigilant while browsing Reddit and remember not to click on any suspicious or inappropriate links. Keep laughing and loving technology, my friends!
That’s all for now. Until next time!
