Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013)

Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) by Houshalter on Saturday February 20, 2016 @07:10PM (#11142624)

I use referrer block for Chrome. I have only twice had anything break from it, and it was a simple fix to whitelist that website. Disqus and coursera both break without referrer.

I don't know why everyone doesn't block referrer. It seems like such a massive breach of privacy to leak that information on every link you click.

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Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) by leephillips on Saturday February 20, 2016 @08:49PM (#11142912)

Referrers are useful and can be a friendly, automatic way of letting someone know how you found their page. I've discovered many links to my pages on other websites, and whole articles discussing my articles, through referrers. Since none of the other pinging mechanisms ever gained universal traction, it's the best thing we have, and I'm sorry that it's all but disappeared. And I remember how amazed I was to discover the existence of "referrer spam" years ago.

You can block referrers in a number of ways whenever you'd like, for example with a simple bookmarklet:

http://lee-phillips.org/norefBookmarklet/

Finally, looking at search terms that led to your site can be very entertaining.

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Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) by hackuser on Saturday February 20, 2016 @07:35PM (#11142701)

Referrer Control in Firefox works very well:

https://addons.mozilla.org/EN-US/firefox/addon/referrer-cont...

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Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) by arm on Saturday February 20, 2016 @07:13PM (#11142636)

In Safari (the OS X version), you can also do this with JS Blocker:

http://jsblocker.toggleable.com/

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Re:Where did all the HTTP referrers go? (2013) by atriix on Saturday February 20, 2016 @07:29PM (#11142681)

Since you mentioned whitelistnig I assume an extension, care share which one?

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