Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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.

that would be the nofollow attribute iirc

You're thinking of nofollow

Damn, you're right, oops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com