I have been noticing for the past few days that my blogs were showing a weird class=”vglnk” on parts of my blog that hosted code, enclosed in code blocks. That isnt supposed to happen, especially not in code blocks. Checking the enabled plugins on WordPress showed nothing amiss. I ran a recursive grep in the entire virtualserver directory. Nada. Not even in an sql search across the database. I checked Chrome extensions-nothing. That’s when it hit me to check Adblock Plus. Sure enough. It had a setting labelled “Allow some non instrusive ads”. On checking the list that they were kind to include, I found this on https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txt:

@@||viglink.com/api/vglnk.js$third-party

I disabled the allow non intrusive ads stuff, and the stupid links went away.
So Adblock plus which one installs to remove ads was actually inserting ads by itself to make itself money. There’s irony for you.