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Comment by georgeg23 | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News has every right to include noreferrer in its links. The destination site was playing games based on the HN origin, so dang just fixed the bug.

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Dang, have you considered applying the noreferrer to all links?

HN users wouldn't notice the difference. I guess the main downside would be the owner of the submitted page might see a spike in traffic without knowing where the traffic is coming from.

Edit: Thinking more, maybe not a great idea across the board. It would make it harder for site owners to recover if HN is causing downtime (hug of death).

A large number of people (including myself) do pay attention to HN referrer analytics as a proxy for tech interest.

> the main downside would be the owner of the submitted page might see a spike in traffic without knowing where the traffic is coming from.

Sounds like a bad outcome - what is the upside to this ?

For that outcome? Probably none, that's why it's the main downside. For other outcomes? It allows the current redirect/content change strategy to be applied without being called out as a specific one-off action to person/group/site, as it is here.

> without being called out as a specific one-off action

But it is a specific one-off action and should be called out

This is in reference to CJ's proposed change of making it a global policy instead of the one off it already is. Without that change, the downside mentioned does not exist.

Noref would also mean they don't gain search engine rank from the link (wikipedia uses it for all external links, to prevent spam), which could annoy some.

edit: that's nofollow not noref, derp.

You're thinking of nofollow

Damn, you're right, oops.

that would be the nofollow attribute iirc

This has been done multiple times by different authors.

All this is because there are a certain number of people who read HN who turn around and go out of their way to abuse the author (outside of HN).

noreferrer was a mistake and such has been said so elsewhere.

They don't want the HN crowd there because it brings abuse & harassment.

If Dang instead would block the domain, everyone would be happy.

It's not true that everyone would be happy. Banning an otherwise fine and on-topic site leads to angry complaints that we've banned it for unfair reasons. Nobody thinks, "oh, I guess they banned it because the site owner asked them to".

If they don't want people visiting their website maybe they shouldn't put it on the internet.

Aside from the actual situation, this pattern of words seems reminiscent of victim blaming.

They could add a login form if they don't want their website to be publicly accessible.

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