[Theforum] Referrers (was: New feature suggestions)

[Martin]

Madhu Menon wrote on 15/11/01 11:52 pm

>
>At CNET, we used to have an extremely complicated system for tracking how 
>people arrived at pages. For example, a URL like:
>http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7890122.html?tag=mn_hd
>
>The "tag" at the end of the URL means that it came from the main page and 
>from a text headline.
>
>Could we do this for our articles? Using Martin's example,
><http://evolt.org/article/Search_Engine_Friendly_URLs_Part_II/17/17171/ind
>ex.html?tag=sigia-l>
>
>This would show up in our logs too, right? And would maintain readable URLs.

I like the extra readability, but still prefer the existing scheme. Why?
1) The readability isn't that important if you've introduced it well
     enough to get visitors to care (ie you've got a whole chunk of info,
     and the article is the detailed "for more, have a look at..." call to
     action)
2) I like that it's not in your face and conducive to being stripped off
     by judgemental people, so does its job better. And even if you
    *wanted* to strip it off, you'd need to know how it worked to get
     it to still work
3) It's a great way to shorten URLs so they don't wrap.

Cheers
Martin

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