5 ms·

If you have a giant traffic spike, it's nice to know where it came from. Eg. if you get linked on Hacker News, you can go to the thread and engage with potentia

• orthecreedence 9y ago
  Weird, every time I get HN traffic the referrer is the HN homepage, never individual posts. Is it just me?
  • yorwba 9y ago
    I guess that's because people click on the link while it's on the frontpage, not from the post's comments section.
• joelthelion 9y ago
  Of course, but that's from the point of view of site owners. Browsers are owned by their users.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  That's not really a direct reason for the client to send them though. There are tons of useful things about referrers to the host. Stripping everything but the domain should be mostly ok for the client though, so if I come from a.b.com/foo, it just sends b.com as referrer? Both "a" and "foo" can hold any amount of data so those would have to go. Sending b.com should be enough to provide traffic statistics?