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A comment on Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links. Parent comment

Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by zamadatix on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @03:28PM (#36232187)
People shouldn't post bad comments on HN either, but HN still needs to ban users and handle spam anyways. The point is about what can realistically be done, not each of us lamenting a different "how the world should be".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by josephcsible on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @03:42PM (#36232395)
The analogy isn't being able to ban users and handle spam. It'd be more like adding a feature with the sole purpose of making it easier to post bad comments.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by zamadatix on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @03:47PM (#36232477)
A clearer relation to how preventing hairy-ball responses, like JWZ has, is like making it easier to post bad comments would be appreciated, I'm having trouble following the relation.

Note: sites can still detect HN users and modify content without the referer. E.g., using the CSS styling for if "news.ycombinator.com" is a visited link. If not visited, content hidden. If visited, content shown. Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point. My comment was that it seems better to let the site just opt out directly, not about what site operators should or shouldn't be doing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by josephcsible on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @03:50PM (#36232522)
> Based on the status the site can also trigger a redirect via JS at that point.

Thankfully no it can't, because browser vendors already know about that vulnerability and have fixed it. Visited link styling can only affect color now, and isn't reflected in getComputedStyle, exactly to prevent that kind of thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by zamadatix on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @04:09PM (#36232807)
Shows how up to date I am on the web :). Did this change prevent all custom messages from being displayable or just triggered actions such as the redirect?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noref... by josephcsible on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @04:11PM (#36232848)
You can display custom messages still, by making the unvisited and visited colors different, and then making the background color the same as the unvisited color, but you can't do anything more elaborate than that.
[ Parent | on HN ]