Zynga Toolbar Issues

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The reputation of the Zynga toolbar has taken another hit.  Earlier, players noticed that the Zynga toolbar was replaced with the Rockholmi.ru toolbar (rockholmi is a Russian radio station).  People are quick to blame Zynga for everything that goes wrong in their lives, and this was no exception. This was no fault of Zynga and was a server glitch at Conduit, the company that hosts and provides the resources for third parties to create and maintain toolbars. This is a classic case of Zynga being Zynga'ed.

I asked Pistol Pete from Spockholm Mafia Tools to explain this to me and his response is below.
"The Famous Zynga Toolbar, known to give players boosts and the Got The Toolbar achievement fell to a simple server glitch. This is something Zynga themselves should be very familiar with. The error was corrected and all affected Zynga Employees had their lives reverted back to a previous time."/Pete Lundrigan

Many players quickly un-installed the toolbar and were thanked for trying the Rockholmi Community Toolbar.
(image from the Zynga Forum Boards)

Bossy Don un-installed the impostor toolbar and then re-installed what was supposed to be the Zynga Toolbar.  Her efforts only yielded a brand new Rockholmi toolbar.
(image from TopMafia.Info)

Soon after, rumors of Russian Spies hacking into your computer hit the news feeds and caused a lot of unnecessary panic.  We were being urged to delete the toolbar, run and viral scan and change all of our passwords.  Nobody hacked into anything using the toolbar.  To get all the information you need, go to the Zynga Forum Board discussion thread titled Zynga Toolbar.  Everything should now be back to normal.  I was off line during all the festivities and nothing is different with my toolbar.

David Rubinstei, Administrator of the Coduit Community Forums, recommends you refresh your toolbar if the Rocholmi one is still there. Click the link for instructions.

This isn't the first time a problem with a third party has negatively impacted the reputation of the Zynga toolbar.  In the middle of June, a few anti-viral software programs were flagging the Zynga toolbar and the South Africa travel destination as a threat (1).  This was a simple coding error and no real damage was done. The toolbar has also come under fire because of a tracking cookie called iesnare. Many players won't install the toolbar because they believe it adds iesnare and Zynga will use it to monitor and ban accounts that show evidence of third party script use.  This is also a rumor.

There should be no reason to worry about using the Zynga Toolbar.  If you don't trust it and feel the need to uninstall, instructions to install and uninstall the Zynga toolbar are on the Zynga Forum Board thread referenced above.  The Zynga Toolbar is only available in FireFox and Internet Explorer.