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Home » Archive » 2003 » January » 30 » Stick to the user-agent, or RSS readers misuse the referrer header
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Daily link icon Thursday, January 30, 2003

Stick to the user-agent, or RSS readers misuse the referrer header

Referral Abuse:

It would be nice if there was some sort of browser header the aggregator could send to identify itself instead of using the referrer field. Oh, that's right, there is. It's called User-Agent.

I've covered this before. I feel evil that I'm now using an aggregator that does just this:

Some aggregators have taken things a step further by allowing the user to use any arbitrary URL as the referrer.

Bad.

So I get 48 "referrals" each day from www.hardhathosting.com even though there's not a single link from their site to mine.

Me too! Finally, Jason has a great argument:

Each time I load a page in Internet Explorer, I don't leave a referer for www.microsoft.com/ie in the log files of the site whose page I loaded, so why should any of the RSS readers be different?

Plus, he has an actual reference to the HTTP RFC where they declare these types of abuses to be illegal.

Chain link icon Permalink | 4 Comments | id 3386
22:31 (utc-5)
 
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Chris (http://www.hardhathosting.com) wrote:

Hey, that's me. Sorry about the 48 referrals a day from HardHatHosting.com. I use Syndirella and it updates every hour. I happened to put one of my company's websites in the referral setting. I never thought of the implications of Syndirella hitting your logs all day long. What would you suggest I use instead?

∴ Chris | 31-Jan-2003 1:10am est | http://www.hardhathosting.com | #1358

Keith (http://www.keithdevens.com/) wrote:

Hey Chris! I'd just put it back to the default, http://www.syndirella.net/. It'd cut down on the proliferation of false referrers.

∴ Keith | 31-Jan-2003 2:06am est | http://www.keithdevens.com/ | #1359

Chris (http://www.hardhathosting.com) wrote:

Thanks Keith...I went with http://www.hardhathosting.com/thanks.html suggested by http://kalsey.com/2003/01/referral_abuse/ . We'll see.

∴ Chris | 31-Jan-2003 7:59am est | http://www.hardhathosting.com | #1364

Ingve (http://almostperfect.editthispage.com/) wrote:

(First: I'm not really defending the current abuse, it only seems that way) :-) I think the "great" IE example is flawed. RSS readers should be different because they are actually trying to do something different. The whole referer-overloading thing was an attempt to create a more two-way web and give readers a way to "leave a trail". IE doesn't even try to give any feedback about who is reading a resource.

∴ Ingve | 31-Jan-2003 9:48pm est | http://almostperfect.editthispage.com/ | #1366

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