There's sometimes a chance that traffic coming back over the internet gets 'diverted' down the wrong pipe.

Imagine a set of fast roads (data pipes / highways) with a roundabout (router) at each end.

If something intended to go to "UK/ your ISP/ your internet connection" gets diverted down the wrong "pipe" you will never see the message (and after a while your browser gives up, and in your case shows a blank page).

I've had similar situation where one of my clients could not see his website. I could see it, and using other machines with other ISPs it could be viewed, but via BT Broadband (his ISP) it was not showing at all. Was a routing problem somewhere (difficult to determine where, usually!)

I once had it when I was using Eclipse, but rang their support staff and an engineer rang me back within an hour saying they had found the problem and fixed it - there are a half dozen or so really Major switching centres across N America and one had a wrong setting.

I just did a check with Firefox, and when I hit the link for Ebuyer from my earlier post, here's what sites were visited:

1)

http://redirectingat.com/?id=470X756&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebuyer.com%2F

GET /?id=470X756&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebuyer.com%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: redirectingat.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Referer: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/geeky_stuff/856374-Having-trouble-looking-at-links-AGAIN

2) redirectingat.com then sent

Location: http://www.ebuyer.com/

3) browser went off to Ebuyer website.

In your case, if you type in www.ebuyer.com does your browser show their (online shop) website? If that works, but clicking the link doesn't, there's something preventing your PC from "seeing" redirectingat.com and that's the most likely reason you're getting blank pages, not the links you click.

thanks webdude, I'm trying to make sense of that!

I'll ask in site stuff, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one it's happening to though.
Why would only certain people be having trouble and not others?

links on MN don't get 'intercepted' to go via that redirectingat website.

If you have the firefox status bar enabled (View / Status Bar) you should see any link displayed at the bottom left of the FF window, in the status bar.

First time you hover over a link you may see the link (eg www.bbc.co.uk/ or www.ebuyer.com/ ) but if you hover over it again, it might show the 'redirectingat.com' link instead.

When you click the link, you may get the 'about:blank' because it tries to load via the redirecting site, but times out, and thus has a completely blank page, because the server was just too slow to send any info to your browser.

Probably best to query if others are getting this in the Site Stuff area

although, weirdly, it works for links which are to other threads on MN

I still can't look at links. Have tried googling but finding nothing

When I click on a link on MN it takes ages to load then I get "problem loading page"

If I go to another tab while it's loading then go back to it, it says "about:blank" in the browser.

wtf is going on? It was fine before!

Ok, I lied

It's gone mad again.

I've just tried to get up three different links. When I navigated away to another tab, it said "about:blank" now all three have "problem loading page"

aaaggghhhh!

FFS!

onagar - you were right. I kept putting off updating the latest firefox. Have done it now and links are working again - yippee!

I got something similar a couple of days ago - it's the "redirectingat" thing - used to gain any advertising commission for MN and their (redirectingat) site was just hopelessly slow.

I don't use a MAC or Firefox, but it could be a security setting if you have changed any. Some browsers might block the redirect part of the link because that kind of thing is used to send you to popups etc.

So you're looking for something in FF settings about blocking popups or 'redirects'

Otherwise I'd check you have the latest updates for FF.

I don't know if you have the equivalent of 'tempory internet files' but if so there might be an option to delete them/clean up.

Aww, pleeeeeease somebody help me!