David Kitchen

I wrote a huge article yesterday on team riding dynamics, and then lost it as I’d set Firefox to not send referer’s and Wordpress uses referer’s during it’s publishing process.

Grrr!

I disable sending referers in Firefox so that I am able to follow links from my stats software without notifying other sites that I am doing so. It also helps view images in threads on Bowlie as some sites implement hotlinking defenses and check that any referer present comes from itself and not a third party site.

The way I’ve been doing this to date was to modify the network.http.sendRefererHeader key in Firefox’s about:config configuration.

The key has three values:
network.http.sendRefererHeader = 0
network.http.sendRefererHeader = 1
network.http.sendRefererHeader = 2 (default)

0 = Send no referer headers at all, to anyone, ever.
1 = Send referer headers only on clicked links, but never on page content such as hotlinked images
2 = Always send a referer header

I had been using 0, but Wordpress requires a referer header so I’ve been jumping back to 1 so that I can use Wordpress and still be able to view hotlinked images.

However this leaves me with a problem: I would now be sending the referer header to sites when I review the statistics for Bowlie.

What I actually need is the ability to determine whether to send referers on a site by site basis, and for that I need an extension.

So, a quick Google later and the very best extension for blocking referers on a site by site basis is RefControl.

With RefControl installed I am able to choose to never send referers when I am on www.bowlie.com, but to send referers when I am on blog.buro9.com.

So now I can browse my statistic pages safe in the knowledge that I’m not revealing that I am doing so, and continue to use WordPress unimpeded.