Some people on a forum I frequent have been getting pop-ups asking them to open or save analytics.js. I thought I’d do a quick search to see if this was a bug, a virus, or something else, and if there was a solution.

The top link in Google was very likely a match, at least for the problem: “Do you want to open or save analytics.js from a.sitemeter.com” and it was on Google’s Blogger product forum.

Clicking on that link, however, flashed the real page and immediately redirected to:

A closed, multi-party/out of date discussion? I don’t even understand that. They can’t possibly be banning multi-party discussions. That’s what a discussion is. The other option is “out of date”, but on hitting the back button I got this:

The discussion looks to be only a few days old. The date doesn’t show the year, but I verified in some of the user profiles that it doesn’t show the year for posts in the current year.

Could it be that it’s a duplicate, and they want you to take part in the duplicate? I clicked on View Discussion and got:

Yes, it’s the original notice banning multi-party discussions. The only difference is that, in this case, there is no back button; the link to the “duplicate discussion” goes directly to the closed notice.

WTF? I think what happened is that they marked discussion A as a duplicate of discussion B, causing A to redirect to B, and then they killed discussion B.

But I’m not sure, because it makes no sense, and that notice is not exactly helpful.