4 ms·

So my understanding is, he is annoyed that other website adds a query string such as "?ref=origin.com" to links pointing to authors website. How does this bene

So my understanding is, he is annoyed that other website adds a query string such as "?ref=origin.com" to links pointing to authors website. How does this benefit the other website? How does this hurt the authors website? I am completely confused about the behavior of both side here. I get that when I run an ad-campaing I want google to add a utm-query string, so I can track which campaign users arrived from - but then the origin and the destination are working together. Here the origin just adds stuff for no reason. Why?

dewey 6mo ago
If you have a popular website and you add that parameter the target easily sees who sends them traffic, that could be the base of sponsorships / affiliate arrangements for example.
- ihateolives 5mo ago
  But you see that anyway from access.log or whatever your server supports and dashboard/analytics shows it anyway? What's the benefit of adding origin to query string?
  - GeneralMaximus 5mo ago
    Not always. Some web pages don't send referrers by making all links rel="noreferrer". Mastodon used to do this by default, though now they've changed their stance. Links opened from non-browser apps don't have any referrer information either. E.g. if somebody shares your link on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram. Email clients may also strip out referrers, but I'm not entirely sure about this one. If people read your work via RSS readers, you'll almost certainly not get any referrers. Unless it's a web-based reader like Feedly. My website gets a lot of traffic marked as "Direct / None" by Plausible. I suspect this is traffic from RSS readers or Mastodon, but I can't be sure. A few times I've considered adding a "?ref=RSS" to all URLs served to RSS readers and "?ref=Mastodon" to everything I post on Mastodon. But like the author of this post, I feel uncomfortable tracking my readers like this.
    - bornfreddy 5mo ago
      I see where (both of you) are coming from, and I'm very privacy conscious (=paranoid) myself, but in this case, as a user, I wouldn't actually mind. It seems to me you would be tracking flows instead of users, which is fine in my book. Now, including Google fonts on every page, using their tag manager, analytics, captcha... That gives me the creeps. Waaay too much information about each and every user. But generic origin query params? Yeah, ok. :shrug:
  - glitchdout 5mo ago
    Adblockers like umatrix have options like "Spoof Referer header". I have this setting enabled, so adding tracking query strings to URLs would go against my user preference.
chrismorgan 6mo ago
I’m broadly anti-tracking: it’s generally against the interests of the individual. Query string additions are commonly used to track things. You can see that lots of people don’t want that by the existence of Firefox features like “copy clean link” and Extended Tracking Protection which proactively strips some like UTM parameters. Some sites happily participate in what I will glibly call the tracking economy. They may benefit because the recipient will see in their logs that lots of people are coming from their site, and do something that helps their site because of that. My rejecting query strings is a simple form of protest against that system.
- tedbradley 5mo ago
  I understand being for privacy, but on the flip side, information about you can result in a better experience. E.g. in the case of tracking where a person comes from, that can help those two websites improve by coordinating with each other in some way. Or your ads might actually show you something you didn't know you existed that you end up buying. That's probably better than seeing ads you likely have zero interest in. I'll admit it's creepy when an ad is incredibly tuned to your recent internet activity, though.
  - chrismorgan 5mo ago
    I started writing a follow-up half an hour before you posted, since the parent comment has been unusually highly voted. I dropped it again, but now you’ve given me something to respond to. I say I’m broadly anti-tracking. I think it’s clear by this point to anyone with a skerrick of wisdom that the logical extreme of tracking is bad. But for a long way it seems innocuous. So how far do you go before declaring it unacceptable? I hold myself to higher standards than I will hold others. For myself, I find it is most reliable not to start. I will occasionally show others this attitude or try mildly to recommend it, but largely that’s up to them. I hate ads (in which I include billboards, newspaper ads, display ads, search ads, Facebook ads, sponsored posts, and a whole lot more; but not first-party stuff, and if it includes content not directly related to what you’re selling, it will probably be exempt too). I block ads as far as I can. Therefore I will never foist ads on others: t’were hypocrisy to do otherwise. I like clean URLs and also hate precise tracking. Therefore if I send a newsletter-style email, it will include plain URLs that don’t track. So I can’t measure “campaign success”? C’est la vie. I’ll survive. I don’t want to scale anyway. I want people to respond by email, and respond to them. People are what matter in this life, even if I find computers far easier to deal with. I dislike tracking where it is not functionally necessary. I confess that I haven’t yet taken this to the logical extreme of not recording server logs at all. I won’t ask clients what they are and where they’re from, but if they tell me, I will still record it for now, I guess. I might go more extreme on this in the future. But when some third party tries to force others to tell things unwittingly… that I don’t like.
0x62 6mo ago
It's marketing for the origin site. The line of thought is that the author sees significant traffic from xyz.com in the ref query string, and considers advertising or partnering with the origin site. Honestly, it is quite useful for niche/startup sites. I have been on both ends of conversations that began from seeing these in web analytics (as someone that saw incoming traffic from a site and reached out, and as someone that received contact from a site I linked to) - and both times it ended in a mutually beneficial partnership. I can understand the privacy argument to some degree, but it provides no more information than the standard Referer header (and if you use analytics like Simple Analytics/Plausible, it is a lot more visible).
- progbits 5mo ago
  > sees significant traffic from xyz.com in the ref query string, and considers advertising Why? Already getting traffic for free.
  - brabel 5mo ago
    You never ran a website for profit, have you? Knowing who is sending you traffic lets you decide whether your marketing is working, where you should write your blog posts to get more views, etc. This has been the way the web works for decades.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
cx42net 5mo ago
I agree with you here, this is an odd reaction to a non-problem. A real-life scenario would be to refuse your snail mail because someone added an extra line in your address. The only plausible reason would be to avoid polluting the data (like faking the ref= for marketing purpose) but that would assume you are already tracking the ref value for other services, so in a way, you either need it or not, but you can't have both. If you don't actively track query strings, having them or not has no impact.

dewey 6mo ago

If you have a popular website and you add that parameter the target easily sees who sends them traffic, that could be the base of sponsorships / affiliate arrangements for example.

ihateolives 5mo ago
But you see that anyway from access.log or whatever your server supports and dashboard/analytics shows it anyway? What's the benefit of adding origin to query string?
- GeneralMaximus 5mo ago
  Not always. Some web pages don't send referrers by making all links rel="noreferrer". Mastodon used to do this by default, though now they've changed their stance. Links opened from non-browser apps don't have any referrer information either. E.g. if somebody shares your link on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram. Email clients may also strip out referrers, but I'm not entirely sure about this one. If people read your work via RSS readers, you'll almost certainly not get any referrers. Unless it's a web-based reader like Feedly. My website gets a lot of traffic marked as "Direct / None" by Plausible. I suspect this is traffic from RSS readers or Mastodon, but I can't be sure. A few times I've considered adding a "?ref=RSS" to all URLs served to RSS readers and "?ref=Mastodon" to everything I post on Mastodon. But like the author of this post, I feel uncomfortable tracking my readers like this.
  - bornfreddy 5mo ago
    I see where (both of you) are coming from, and I'm very privacy conscious (=paranoid) myself, but in this case, as a user, I wouldn't actually mind. It seems to me you would be tracking flows instead of users, which is fine in my book. Now, including Google fonts on every page, using their tag manager, analytics, captcha... That gives me the creeps. Waaay too much information about each and every user. But generic origin query params? Yeah, ok. :shrug:
- glitchdout 5mo ago
  Adblockers like umatrix have options like "Spoof Referer header". I have this setting enabled, so adding tracking query strings to URLs would go against my user preference.

chrismorgan 6mo ago

I’m broadly anti-tracking: it’s generally against the interests of the individual. Query string additions are commonly used to track things. You can see that lots of people don’t want that by the existence of Firefox features like “copy clean link” and Extended Tracking Protection which proactively strips some like UTM parameters. Some sites happily participate in what I will glibly call the tracking economy. They may benefit because the recipient will see in their logs that lots of people are coming from their site, and do something that helps their site because of that. My rejecting query strings is a simple form of protest against that system.

tedbradley 5mo ago
I understand being for privacy, but on the flip side, information about you can result in a better experience. E.g. in the case of tracking where a person comes from, that can help those two websites improve by coordinating with each other in some way. Or your ads might actually show you something you didn't know you existed that you end up buying. That's probably better than seeing ads you likely have zero interest in. I'll admit it's creepy when an ad is incredibly tuned to your recent internet activity, though.
- chrismorgan 5mo ago
  I started writing a follow-up half an hour before you posted, since the parent comment has been unusually highly voted. I dropped it again, but now you’ve given me something to respond to. I say I’m broadly anti-tracking. I think it’s clear by this point to anyone with a skerrick of wisdom that the logical extreme of tracking is bad. But for a long way it seems innocuous. So how far do you go before declaring it unacceptable? I hold myself to higher standards than I will hold others. For myself, I find it is most reliable not to start. I will occasionally show others this attitude or try mildly to recommend it, but largely that’s up to them. I hate ads (in which I include billboards, newspaper ads, display ads, search ads, Facebook ads, sponsored posts, and a whole lot more; but not first-party stuff, and if it includes content not directly related to what you’re selling, it will probably be exempt too). I block ads as far as I can. Therefore I will never foist ads on others: t’were hypocrisy to do otherwise. I like clean URLs and also hate precise tracking. Therefore if I send a newsletter-style email, it will include plain URLs that don’t track. So I can’t measure “campaign success”? C’est la vie. I’ll survive. I don’t want to scale anyway. I want people to respond by email, and respond to them. People are what matter in this life, even if I find computers far easier to deal with. I dislike tracking where it is not functionally necessary. I confess that I haven’t yet taken this to the logical extreme of not recording server logs at all. I won’t ask clients what they are and where they’re from, but if they tell me, I will still record it for now, I guess. I might go more extreme on this in the future. But when some third party tries to force others to tell things unwittingly… that I don’t like.

0x62 6mo ago

It's marketing for the origin site. The line of thought is that the author sees significant traffic from xyz.com in the ref query string, and considers advertising or partnering with the origin site. Honestly, it is quite useful for niche/startup sites. I have been on both ends of conversations that began from seeing these in web analytics (as someone that saw incoming traffic from a site and reached out, and as someone that received contact from a site I linked to) - and both times it ended in a mutually beneficial partnership. I can understand the privacy argument to some degree, but it provides no more information than the standard Referer header (and if you use analytics like Simple Analytics/Plausible, it is a lot more visible).

progbits 5mo ago
> sees significant traffic from xyz.com in the ref query string, and considers advertising Why? Already getting traffic for free.
- brabel 5mo ago
  You never ran a website for profit, have you? Knowing who is sending you traffic lets you decide whether your marketing is working, where you should write your blog posts to get more views, etc. This has been the way the web works for decades.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

cx42net 5mo ago

I agree with you here, this is an odd reaction to a non-problem. A real-life scenario would be to refuse your snail mail because someone added an extra line in your address. The only plausible reason would be to avoid polluting the data (like faking the ref= for marketing purpose) but that would assume you are already tracking the ref value for other services, so in a way, you either need it or not, but you can't have both. If you don't actively track query strings, having them or not has no impact.