Did they come thru the Re-director ? - How can I check if user came via a certain redirector ?

Anonymous posted this at 03:14 — 22nd July 1999.

Joined: Jan 1970

Hi all, hope you can help !

This is very hard to explain, so please bear with me (in this long post)...

I'm setting up a webpage, but don't have a domain name. I'm advertising the site's URL as one of the redirector services (ie: via come.to or cjb.net).

The re-direction services are set up to load my page into a FRAMESET (rows=100%,0) - so that the URL and TITLE shown on user's browser are the ones I want them to use (and bookmarks work, etc).

Since the site may move around, I want to ensure user always comes via a redirector, and not from a bookmark or link to the "real" URL.

I wrote a script that captures 'document.referrer' and compares it to an array of "good URL's" - also it checks for a blank referrer (ie: opening from a bookmark) and return an alert if they didn't come from where I stated.

Great - it seemed to work (at first).

After the redirect, in IE the 'document.referrer=' returns the redirect URL. Good, just what I needed.

BUT, in NS the 'referrer=' is blank if the page was loaded via the re-director URL !

OK, I then thought I would just send them thru a "gateway" page with a META-REFRESH or a JavaScript onLoad re-direction. Then I tried capturing *that* page's URL in my script as the 'referrer'.

BUT, in IE the 'referrer=' is blank if I do my *own* re-direction, yet in NS it returns the correct info (the exact reverse of what happened before).

This is something to do with variations between JScript and JavaScript... it's making me angry !

Also, it means that any tracking utilities (counters, etc) will not return the 'referrer' if NS is used.

All I want is to check the URL or some other property that I can use to identify whether they came thru my specified re-director pages.

My only thought at the moment is to check on the 'navigator' and have 2 completely different scripts based on the browser type - but that is a very messy way around it, and is not "future-proof" )