News Links

I have Netbarrier set up to block the referrer field, because I don't like being a marketing statistic. also because I don't like people finding out about the naughty sites I visit.

regardless, the only place this has given me trouble is here on MR. links in news stories which go through the https://www.macrumors.com/c.php intermediate page (ie. all external links) end up spitting me back out at https://www.macrumors.com/... even links in Page 2 stories.

I have no idea what purpose c.php serves, but is it possible that it could be tweaked or removed so that I don't have to go into my firewall preferences every time I want to follow a link in a news story?

I believe so. I believe that a new tab returns a blank referrer field, so the same cause.

however, I just checked it out. it works properly (with my referrer blocking off of course) when I command-click or middle click on the link, but not when I right-click and use "open in a new tab".

edit:

Nermal said:

Still problematic here. If I right-click and Open Link in New Tab, it goes to the MR home page. If I middle-click the link, it opens correctly

Click to expand...

word.

I'm going to set up a simple JavaScript simulation and see if I can confirm my... suspicions.

edit 2:


that returns a blank page for me, even when I follow a link from another page. referrer blocking is off, so what am I doing wrong? (nevermind, see below.)

so far it looks like Safari isn't reporting referrer at all.

tested with Mozilla, blank there too. weird.

edit 3:

uploaded the referrer page to my website. try clicking the link below:

http://www.intrigueblue.com/referrer.html

edit 4:

it works when the referrer is an external URL (as opposed to file://). so that answers that question. as I suspected, referrer is reported when you center-click or command-click a link but NOT when you right-click and select open in a new tab.

I don't know what c.php contains or why it doesn't work properly with a blank referrer value, but that is exactly the case. I can't think that referrer would be needed for what it does though... out of curiosity, what purpose does it serve?

edit 5: (couldn't resist)

bizarrely, right-clicking and selecting open in a new window does return a referrer and thus works properly.

edit 6:

ok, that's bizzare.

the JavaScript document.referrer value is not being blocked by NetBarrier. the page behaves exactly the same when blocking is enabled.

still wondering what exactly c.php does, what referrer value it accesses (PHP maybe?) and why it does so.

time to stop editing too.

works perfectly.

thanks so much.