Well spotted, that's a cool trick---it is almost hidden.
Any recommendations for passing referral ids in a fully stealth fashion between domains, e.g., by reading the referrer attribute of the GET request? A django app?
People comping to mysite.com/refID could bypass the referral program and re-visit the base url mysite.com. I'm fine with this, but it's not cool from refID's point of view. The main problem is the person visiting via the referral link might wonder whether the refID really recommends mysite.com wholeheartedly, or out to make a buck.
That's really that problem with every recommendation system that actually offers you something of worth, isn't it? When I wrote the referral system, I wasn't aware of the fact that people might read something into it. I was basically coding away and thinking: "Well now that I used the referral code, I might as well remove it. Nobody needs it anymore."
As people started complaining that their links didn't work - which in fact, they did all along - we decided to leave it in the URL from now on. Such is life ;)
Comments
Well spotted, that's a cool trick---it is almost hidden.
Any recommendations for passing referral ids in a fully stealth fashion between domains, e.g., by reading the referrer attribute of the GET request? A django app?
People comping to mysite.com/refID could bypass the referral program and re-visit the base url mysite.com. I'm fine with this, but it's not cool from refID's point of view. The main problem is the person visiting via the referral link might wonder whether the refID really recommends mysite.com wholeheartedly, or out to make a buck.
That's really that problem with every recommendation system that actually offers you something of worth, isn't it? When I wrote the referral system, I wasn't aware of the fact that people might read something into it. I was basically coding away and thinking: "Well now that I used the referral code, I might as well remove it. Nobody needs it anymore."
As people started complaining that their links didn't work - which in fact, they did all along - we decided to leave it in the URL from now on. Such is life ;)