[thelist] formmail "bad referrer" error, with no apparent cause?

[deke]

On 8 Dec 2001, at 12:26, Heather Quinn posted a message which said:

> It was a genuine bad referrer error from a genuine user.  I took another
> look at the error the user sent on to us, and the referrer is missing
> its leading www.  Now I'm hanging my head in embarrassment because,
> being the detail-oriented person I am, I always type in full URL's and
> I've completely ignored the people who type in "somesite.com", and get a
> return URL of "http://somesite.com" due to virtual hosting config files.
> :(

It's not that they are typing in partial URLs and you're typing in full 
ones. It's that www.somesite.com and somesite.com are different 
domains, and *can* have different IPs - and even if the IPs are the 
same, can point to different websites.  

Most hosting companies give you both URLs pointing to the same 
directory, but Tom Christiansen used to have different websites at 
perl.com and www.perl.com  (They are both the same O'Reilly 
website now although interestingly, they are running Apache rather 
than the server that O'Reilly publishes. Homesite? Something like 
that.)

deke

--------
We are the parents our people warned us about....