Details
When visiting a webpage, the referrer or referring page is the URL of the previous webpage from which a link was followed.
More generally, a referer is the URL of a previous item which led to this request. The referer for an image, for example, is generally the HTML page on which it is to be displayed. The referer field is an optional part of the HTTP request sent by the web browser to the web server.
Many websites log referers as part of their attempt to track their users. Most web log analysis software can process this information. Because referer information can violate privacy, some web browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referer information. Some proxy and firewall software will also filter out referer information, to avoid leaking the location of non-public websites. This can, in turn, cause problems: some web servers block parts of their website to web browsers that do not send the right referer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorised use of images (bandwidth theft). Some proxy software has the ability to give the top-level address of the target website as the referer, which usually prevents these problems while still not divulging the user's last-visited website.
Recently many blogs have started publishing referer information in order to link back to people who are linking to them, and hence broaden the conversation. This has led, in turn, to the rise of referer spam: the sending of fake referer information in order to popularize the spammer's website.
Many pornographic paysites use referer information to secure their websites. Only web browsers arriving from a small set of approved (login) pages are given access; this facilitates the sharing of materials among a group of cooperating paysites. Referer spoofing is often used to gain free access to these paysites.
Read more about this topic: HTTP Referer
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)