Meta: what's with the weird referrals?

Kyori thought this was worth mentioning said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 12:52am ET

This is my first topic, so sorry if I’m doing this wrong. I noticed the other day some really odd referrals. One linked to some dude’s arrest record, there’s one today from an article about a car, stuff like that. Are people using the referral stats to advertise their stuff or something? And if so the arrest record one really confused me. I took a screenshot from the other day, I can upload it if anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

4 comments, 1 reply
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PlacidPenguin said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 12:57am ET:

The referral list is odd. There have been quite a few times that NSFW sites have shown up on the list (from what I’ve heard).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Willijs3 said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 8:14am ET:

Are you talking about the “How’d you get here” section? I had no idea those were clickable until just now.

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- @Willijs3 Yep, they’re clickable. Enjoy your newfound knowledge and click all the ads!
  
  Kyori said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 4:56pm ET
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snapster said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 12:47pm ET:

Referral logs are classic targets of “referrer spam”, which unfortunately is not people sending you unsolicited reefer.

Basically, if you (a crazy site displaying their referrer log data) want to allow previously unknown sites to automatically show up, you’re playing a manual blacklist game. Very low advantage to the spamming but also very low effort keeps things like this occurring.

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Kyori said Mon, Jul 9th 2018 at 4:56pm ET:

That’s fair, and I’d completely expect it, it’s just some of the URL choices are very strange and don’t seem like advertising at all. I guess someone just really didn’t like that guy so they wanted people to see his arrest record. That’s the one I’m still just stuck on.

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