Mysterious Appearance of a URL

[kenmorgan]

Something very strange has occurred. When I bring up a OpenOffice page that I've worked on before, there in the middle of a paragraph is a URL for one of the articles on Townhall.com. It's happened twice in the last few days. The URLs didn't appear while I was typing, nor did they appear at the exact place where I was typing, but close to it. In one instance, the page I brought up hadn't been looked at for quite some time, and when I brought it up there was a URL!! I was so disgusted that I didn't check to see if it was an old article on Townhall, but I assume it was.

Any idea what could cause this? Townhall is not likely to be a malicious hacker. But how could ANYONE put a URL on one of our OpenOffice documents?

Thanks.

Ken

[RusselB]

Are you sure that you didn't put the URL in yourself? Sometimes having text that looks like a URL is sufficient for the Auto-Replace portion to make it into a URL.
I don't know exactly what is required for the auto-replace to think that plain text should be a URL, but I do know that it does happen.
As it (probably) is the auto-replace, it might not have shown up until a bit after you entered the text, since the auto-replace, while (usually) fast, does still take time.
If you'd like me to examine your document, by all means attach it to this topic and I'll take a look and do my best to advise you further.

[kenmorgan]

Thanks, Russel, for responding!

I'm not familiar with "Auto-Replace." I tried to find it on the OpenOffice Writer "Help" index, but it was not in the list. I noticed you run Windows. Could Auto-Replace be something the Windows version of OpenOffice has that the Linux version does not have?

Anyway, I just looked at a current article on townhall.com to get an example of the URL for one of their articles:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/timothyme ... t-n2550399

We would never have typed anything close to looking like this URL that Auto-Replace would think looked like a URL.

You asked about looking at a document that had a URL in it. Unfortunately, we don't have a current example. All those URLs that we found had to be removed immediately so we could re-upload those documents to our Web site. It was a bit of a panic when we wondered if someone coming to our Web site had seen one of those ridiculous URLs.

Also, a failed to mention it in my post above, but we also found one of those URLs among the HTML code of one of our Web site pages. I do all the coding myself using gedit on my computer. So again, the question is raised as to whether hacking occurred.

[floris v]

It's called Autocorrect, you can configure the options in Tools - Autocorrect - Options. See if Url recognition (4th from above) is checked.
Also check your Autotext collection - if you ever use Autotext. You might once have added an Autotext item with that link, and accidentally type the shortcut and F3, on which the link is inserted.

You never do anything with townhall.com? Is the link always the same?

[RusselB]

My apologies to the OP and thanks to floris for the correction on the terminology.

[kenmorgan]

Thanks for the response, Floris!

We have never used AutoCorrect or AutoText.

To answer your first question, no. Our Web site is a Bible study Web site, so we would never have typed anything with "townhall" in it, whether in OpenOffice or HTML code.

To answer your second question, neither I nor my wife can remember if they were all the same. However, I would very much doubt that they would be the same.

[kenmorgan]

Lots of mysteries today!

I just received two mysterious emails from aoo.forum.en. They seem to imply that if I don't log in and reply to a response right away, something might happen called "unsubscribe topic."

I hope that is not what your emails meant. Many things occur during the day, and most people are not on the computer all day long. I'm going to be logging off now since it's getting late in the evening on Eastern time. I'm hoping we can continue discussing my problem tomorrow. But again, I won't be on the computer through the whole day. I hope this is okay.

Ken

[RusselB]

As a long time member of this forum, and having "risen" to the rank of moderator (which Floris also is), I can say for sure that something is wrong with those e-mails.
I'm quite sure the forum administrators would be interested in seeing those e-mails, so, when (and if) you can, please attach them to another e-mail and send it to aoo.forum.en@gmail.com
If you can't attach them, then forwarding them, I think, would be appropriate.

[floris v]

Sent a PM to explain matters.

[robleyd]

I suspect the email may have been a result of having the option at the bottom of the post selected to “Notify me when a reply is posted “.

One then gets an email like the following when someone replies to the post.

“Hello robleyd,

You are receiving this notification because you are watching the topic,
"Test post" at "Apache OpenOffice Community Forum". This topic has received
a reply since your last visit. You can use the following link to view the
replies made, no more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic.

If you want to view the newest post made since your last visit, click the
following link:

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you want to view the topic, click the following link:
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you want to view the forum, click the following link:
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you no longer wish to watch this topic you can either click the
"Unsubscribe topic" link found at the bottom of the topic above, or by
clicking the following link:


https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?xxxxxx=Xxxxxx9&unwatch=topic

--
Thanks, The Team!”

[keme]

Do the links appear when you open the documents in Writer, or only when they are viewed in the web browser?

If it is only in the browser, it may be a form of contextual advertising, or your browser may be hijacked.

Contextual advertising is linked to the web service and will appear similarly for all visitors to the page. "Free" web hotel solutions may have a user agreement which allows them to insert advertising on the served web pages. Are you using such a service?

Browser hijack is local to your computer, and will not appear when visiting the page from a different computer.

[kenmorgan]

Sorry for the delay, Keme.

"Do the links appear when you open the documents in Writer, or only when they are viewed in the web browser?"

My wife does almost all the typing of OpenOffice odt documents that we plan to put on our Web site. After a document is typed on OpenOffice, she exports it to create a pdf document. I have put Apache on one of our local in-house computers so that we can check every detail on our local Web site before uploading anything to our Web site online. Firefox, of course, can pull up our local Web site on our home computer or our Web site on the Internet. So after my wife creates an OpenOffice document, she exports it as a pdf document and either she or I put it on
our local Web site. If everything is okay, we upload that Web page to our Web site online. That Web site, as well as our other Web sites, is on my VPS with Bluehost.com.

I just checked with my wife to get every detail correct, and I think I was somewhat inaccurate in my first post here. As far as she can remember, she has never seen a Townhall URL while actually typing a document on OpenOffice. She has spotted all of them after putting the pdf document on our local Web site. Then she goes back to the odt copy and sure enough the URL is there also! She quickly removes it, re-exports the document, puts it on our local Web site, and then quickly uploads it to our Internet Web site so no one else can see such an outrageous item on one of our Web site pages!

"Contextual advertising is linked to the web service and will appear similarly for all visitors to the page. "Free" web hotel solutions may have a user agreement which allows them to insert advertising on the served web pages. Are you using such a service?"

Never heard of "Free web hotel."

"Browser hijack is local to your computer, and will not appear when visiting the page from a different computer."

Now that's an interesting idea. The local computer my wife uses could be hijacked--I'm rather negligent in regularly running ClamAV. BUT if it's only Firefox that has been hacked, how did the
Townhall URL get on the original OpenOffice document? That seems to be the ultimate question.

[floris v]

Does your wife actually type all documents from scratch, or does she also copy text from websites where the urls might be hiding?

[kenmorgan]

Yes, she types all the documents from scratch.

But one thing might be significant. My wife does look at six or eight conservative news Web sites every morning, and Townhall.com was one of them. However, she distinctly remembers that the URLs that made an appearance were NOT articles that she had read. Because of all this trouble, roughly a week ago she stopped going to Townhall, and I removed their cookies. We haven't seen any URLs since then. However, as an experiment, we could go to Townhall again and see if the Townhall URLs start appearing again. She's currently working on a new feature that we are putting on our Web site, so she's doing a lot of typing.