Referer reality

Chris Morgan is tired of people tacking query strings onto his URLs — e.g. www.robinsloan.com/lab/?like=this&and=this—so he’s con­fig­ured his web­site to reject those requests outright, rather than suffer in silence.

Naturally, any­body is free to set up their server in any way they like … however, Chris writes this:

If I wanted to know [where a vis­itor came from] I’d look at the Ref­erer header; and if it isn’t there, it’s prob­ably for a good reason.

which isn’t really true anymore. For most web­sites, the majority — not just the plurality, but the majority — of vis­itors arrive by fol­lowing a link inside an email or an app (e.g. Instagram, Mes­sages on iOS, the Sub­stack app), nei­ther of which set a Ref­erer header; so, all of those vis­itors are lumped into a vast slab called Direct or Unknown.

This broken mech­a­nism pro­vides the impetus for the custom query string I append to all out­going links, utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me: under­standing that many/most clicks on links I share will come from my email newsletter, I want the source to be legible, par­tic­u­larly in con­texts such as, e.g., Shopify.

This isn’t an argu­ment that Chris Morgan should do any­thing different — opinionated oper­ator deci­sions make the internet go round — but rather an oppor­tu­nity for clar­i­fi­ca­tion about the cur­rent state of play.

I don’t col­lect or review ana­lytics of any kind on my web­sites, so I’m not a con­sumer of this kind of referral info. Even so, my custom query string is, in my calculation, an expres­sion of dig­ital etiquette: rather than dump a load of anony­mous traffic on your doorstep, I reveal who’s linking, so a web­site or online shop oper­ator can trace it back and get in touch, if wanted or needed. (Memorably, this was useful when the Abrams Planetarium received a wave of new sub­scrip­tions and weren’t sure if they were legitimate; a brief email cor­re­spon­dence assured them that yes, these people were real … they were nerdy … they wanted the Sky Calendar!)

Note that a handful of sites do choke on unex­pected query strings, including YouTube (!), so I main­tain a list of exceptions, to which chrismorgan.info is now added.