Since Sunday July 26th, the blogging platform Substack has been breaking all incoming links with a ?ref parameter, a standard part of how publications see who shared links to their sites.

The issue has been reported to Substack through multiple channels, but so far they have been either unwilling or unable to fix it. This has caused incoming links to Substack publications from around the web to break.

If you hit a broken Substack link, beyond reporting the issue to Substack, you may be able to fix the individual links as follows:

1) go to your address bar and delete everything after the question mark from the URL. E.g:

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/big-news-culture-study-is-moving?ref=substack&example —> will briefly load the page and then throw up a frog image and a "this page croaked" message

delete everything after the question mark to get: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/big-news-culture-study-is-moving

and the link should work again.

2) when you hit the Substack branded "this page has croaked" interstitial, click "go to home" to go to that publications homepage and search for the recommended piece, then click from there.

Unfortunately, the long term solution to this issue is entirely in Substack's hands; if you are able to report this directly to Substack that will help greatly.