phil ringnalda

Speaking of referrer abuse, does anyone have a good idea for how I can stop my own little referrer sin? When I posted three ways to surf blogs at random, I expected that people would maybe click the links in the page once or twice to see what it was like, and then either drag a link to their links bar/personal toolbar folder/whatever you like to call it, or right-click and bookmark the link. However, it appears that not everyone does it that way, and when you click the link in the page, you just get a redirect from the random blog page, and so your browser delivers 2281 as a referrer. Then the poor blogger that you surfed to at random checks his referrer log, sees that referrer, and comes over to see what I said about him. Worse yet, if his stats page is publically accessible, my referrer script emails me about it (which is why 2281 is the only one of my posts I know by number: “New referrer [002281.php]” starts trickling in a few hours after someone does some random surfing), and then to make it look as much like I’m trying to trick them as possible, sticks a link to their stats page at the bottom of my page.

I don’t really want to do any referrer scrubbing in the script itself (and after all, I can’t do anything about the Blogger and blo.gs scripts), but I don’t have any good ideas for how to do a link that can only be right-clicked or dragged, but not clicked. I could do onclick="alert('Please bookmark the link rather than clicking it'); return false;", but I’d guess that would prevent dragging the link, which is what I would do myself (and I wouldn’t be pleased by an alert that said “Sorry, no dragging allowed, you have to right click instead”). Got a better idea?