This is a mini-rant, a short essay refuting a common misconception among users of an Internet forum. If you think this essay is FUD, feel free to explain why on the essay's talk page.
Tynt is a web analytics service provided by 33Across. Tynt Publisher Tools track everything you copy to the Clipboard from any web page that uses them. If you copy at least seven words, it sends the keywords that you copied to Tynt's server, and then it appends an attribution consisting of "Read more:", the title of the page, and the page's URL that includes a fragment identifier that tracks each individual copy made from the page.[1] This happens even if you are copying only the title of the article for use in a citation in another style.
Some people find Tynt useful because it automatically creates citations.[2] I wouldn't mind Tynt so much if users could configure it to format the appended text as a MediaWiki citation or as a citation that meets other publications' style guides. But unless and until Tynt adds a control for end users to customize the citation format, I have to format citations manually the way I do for every other web page, and having to chop the Tynt garbage off every article title copied from Cracked and PC Pro becomes tiring. So if you're as picky as I am about attribution style, I recommend opting out of Tynt.
I sent the following to Tynt's contact page on June 23, 2012:
Since Tynt Publisher Tools became well known, other analytics providers have added similar features to allow tracking and automatic attribution of copied text in a fixed format. AddThis is among them,[3] and a cursory Google search offered no way for individual end users to opt out of AddThis text copy tracking to as of October 2012, though publishers using AddThis can opt an entire site out.
Categories: Mini-rants