Best I can tell, there is zero incentive for Quora (or any other site, for that matter) to care. Their current redirect logic in no way hurts their user experience.
Right now they protect their users' privacy. What benefit do they realize by providing their users' viewing history to other sites?
I personally think that the referer header was never a good idea. I disable it in my browser, and appreciate sites that do right by their users with privacy protecting default behaviors.
I think that is does benefit Quora for content providers to see how much traffic is being generated from their site. If I knew an article was getting a lot of traction on a site I would spend more time on there, perhaps participate and continue to improve and generate content itself, thus benefiting Quora with more data and more links for everyone.
Of course there is zero incentive for anyone to do it. And if everyone chose to link the way Quora does, you get a Google Analytics dashboard which cannot tell you what all URL's are sending traffic to your site/blog. I find it really difficult to imagine.
On sites where there's private information in the URLs + links to external sites, overriding the referrer is necessary in order to protect users' privacy / identity. See https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/protecti... for why we do this at Facebook (I work on that system).
Indeed, referers are useful information in some cases. For bookmarking apps like http://noteplz.com one useful thing is that along with the bookmark, they also store the referer, so you can later go back to the google search result where you found that bookmark.
On the other hand, with https and url shorteners,referers are a dying breed. The situation with URL shorteners is absurdly funny now, because twitter double-shortens the shortened urls, since most popular sites have their own shortener.
This is probably not the case, but is it possible that Quora is intentionally stripping the referer header? Duck Duck Go does just this in the interest of user privacy: why should site X know where I came from and what I was searching? https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html Seems unlikely in this case but possible.
Incidentally, it seems that encrypted.google.com does this but not regular google. EDIT: This happens for all https->http requests, it's not a google feature (TIL).
The User-Agent generates the Referrer header, not the site. Also, encrypted.google.com doesn't do it, the HTTPS standard says that browsers shouldn't send referrer headers to sites not in the same domain or not with https.
encrypted.google.com does this because it uses https. If a website is accessed from https and a link points to anywhere except another secure location, then the referrer is not sent.
Sending an incorrect site referrer to a downstream website doesn't solve the identity problem! HTTP headers have existed even before all these applications came into being. One just has to abide by some of those basics.
Since you are a hosted service, you could periodically loop through all of the Quora redirect links you've received and resolve them. This might be against Quora's TOS, though.
I believe Twitter does this with URL shortener links posted in tweets.
Seems you saw a Quora survey on our site? We had to change the targeting rules to make it a generic "referring site starts with Quora.com" kinda rule instead of specific URL's :(
[+] [-] kogir|14 years ago|reply
Right now they protect their users' privacy. What benefit do they realize by providing their users' viewing history to other sites?
I personally think that the referer header was never a good idea. I disable it in my browser, and appreciate sites that do right by their users with privacy protecting default behaviors.
[+] [-] marquis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuvadam|14 years ago|reply
Says who? Google and their `/url`? Facebook and their `l.php`?
[+] [-] larrik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkjones|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerostar07|14 years ago|reply
On the other hand, with https and url shorteners,referers are a dying breed. The situation with URL shorteners is absurdly funny now, because twitter double-shortens the shortened urls, since most popular sites have their own shortener.
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sequoia|14 years ago|reply
Incidentally, it seems that encrypted.google.com does this but not regular google. EDIT: This happens for all https->http requests, it's not a google feature (TIL).
[+] [-] jimktrains2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerotrain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropyneur|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acharekar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buddydvd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
A better title for your article would have been:
why to never rely on referers
(which can be blocked or purposely malformed)
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gecco|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnutt|14 years ago|reply
I believe Twitter does this with URL shortener links posted in tweets.
[+] [-] mthreat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casca|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avlesh-singh|14 years ago|reply