MeFi in the referrals, but no links. Odd?

July 26, 2001 1:06 PM

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but in the last couple of weeks, the URLs of three different MetaFilter threads have shown up in the referral stats for my website. When I've checked the URLs, I've found no links to anything on my site. Does anyone know why such MetaFilter threads would be showing up in my stats? Is this happening to anyone else?

I use SiteMeter to monitor my stats... I don't know if that's part of the problem or not.
posted by Tin Man to MetaFilter-related at 1:06 PM (10 comments total)

Browser bug, I think. With some versions of IE, you will sometimes get a referrer of whatever someone was looking at in another window when they went to your site.
posted by kindall at 1:12 PM on July 26, 2001

Ahh. Thanks for the tip.
posted by Tin Man at 1:27 PM on July 26, 2001

Really? So if I have sex.com in one window and I go to csmonitor.com in another, sex.com might show up in csmonitor's referral stats? Jiminie Christmas.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 2:48 PM on July 26, 2001

please say that this is a windoze only thing...
posted by machaus at 3:15 PM on July 26, 2001

Yeah, it only affects Windoze if I'm remembering it correctly. i could have completely made it up, though, as I can't remember where I read that.
posted by kindall at 3:52 PM on July 26, 2001

if you want to get around that, you might consider opening a new IE process. this effect logically should only happen if you open a new window from an existing IE -- that new window is a thread of the original process, and they share the same memory space. a new process has a new memory space, and probably has no idea what any other IE is doing. so, in case you don't want matt to know you just came from bangable.com, that's the way to go.
posted by moz at 7:14 PM on July 26, 2001

The latest release of the Opera browser, version 5.12, has this problem. You can expect a fix in 5.13 and, while you're waiting, you can just shoot me now for being geeky enough to know this. Thanks!
posted by shinybeast at 9:48 PM on July 26, 2001

Maybe Opera is what I was thinking of.
posted by kindall at 11:29 PM on July 26, 2001

No, it's an IE bug. Opera just picked it up to make sure that IE users who migrated over didn't feel disoriented. ;-)
posted by fooljay at 12:18 AM on July 27, 2001

browser bugs, yes, but don't forget there are a lot more people using proxies lately, and many of them allow you to specify a "referrer". i'm finding a lot of off the wall pages in my logs which contain no link to my site whatsoever.
posted by quonsar at 10:43 AM on July 31, 2001