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More on referrers

edit David Janes 2004-05-22 16:23 UTC 4 comments  ·

Three things that have sealed the deal for me on whether I'm going to use the referrer field.

  1. These two posts — here and here, they key phrase being "The key lesson here is that you shouldn't be messing with the viral aspect of your product".
  2. Doc Searl's referrer logs. Note the presence of Technorati's home page, NetNewsWire and Radio Userland. Sorry, I don't have one thousandth the budget of Dave Sifry or John Robb: they define the playing field and if they're going to use it, so are the other players.

Since I've added Jäger to the referrer field, hits and downloads have had a substantial increase. If Jäger's showing up in your referrers a lot, it's because a lot of people are hitting your site with it. Note that the vast number of these hits are probably adding very little load to your server, since Jäger is very well behaved with regards to If-Modified-Since and ETags.

The referrer page will link to '/user', a page that will explain what Jäger is.

Comment #1 — Mark

2004-05-23 17:21:38
Oh, I see I'm too late with my advice. Still have to disagree. (And I thought Marc Canter's point was the importance of NOT annoying potential paying customers.) Too bad the stats software people can't handle things better so that at least the hits which involve no real data transfer don't get logged the same as all the rest.

Comment #2 — Marc Canter

2004-05-24 00:48:34
Well I have to admit I got here via my Technorati watchlist. Not sure what I found though.

Comment #3 — Phil Ringnalda

2004-05-24 03:51:14
I don't think Doc's referer log was the best one to choose: how about Wes Felter's [1]? I think that better shows the company that you are choosing to keep: Radio, Manila, really old copies of NNW (Brent stopped abusing referrer in February 2003), and teen-anal-rape.internationalmastergardener.com, pissing-picture.com, and free-pantyhose-sex-pics-pantyhose-hardcore-sex-gallery.com.

Do you really want spamvertising that badly? Hey, RSS 2.0 has a comments element that tells you where to find the comments for an element, and usually there's a form as well, and I've got a copy of FloodMT that does pretty effective automatic posting to Movable Type comments: how about we wire that up so that every time someone reads an item, it leaves a comment saying "Hey! I read this item in Jäger, from http://jager.blogmatrix.com - quite simply, the fastest and easiest tool available for reading weblogs and news."

That's not quite enough, though, is it? Feeds have several elements where you can find email addresses: how about sending them a reminder, say once a day, just to let them know that you are reading their feed, in Jäger.

BTW, I know quite a few people who have gotten so sick of referers like those above that they've started running scripts against their log files once a day, to automatically ban requests with a referer that looks like spam. Is getting your spamvertising worth the support headache, once people start asking why they get a 403 Forbidden with Jäger, but not with other readers?

[1] http://wmf.editthispage.com/stats/referers

Comment #4 — David

2004-05-24 04:35:32
Hmmmm. Excellent points, I have to say all. I shall ponder all deeply over night before I release the next version. The 403 argument is particularly persuasive :-0


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