Comment by debugnik

6 hours ago

This site redirects to HN when it notices HN in the referrer.

This is an interesting way to prevent the hug of death. I wonder what the author's reasoning is, also would it really be effective?

  • I doubt it, the redirect is client-side, I got a flash of the page before the redirect.

    • If anything, it's going to at least double its traffic this way when people click again assuming they hit back somehow.

If you have JavaScript enabled, that is. JWZ at least does the redirect on the server side.

The following is pulled in from `https://soc.me/assets/js/turnBack.js`:

    const undesirables = [
      "news.ycombinator.com/",
      // "reddit.com/", // disable temporaily
      "lobste.rs/"
    ] ;

    if (undesirables.find(site => document.referrer.includes(site))) {
      window.location.replace(document.referrer);
    }

I wonder why Reddit is "temporarily not undesirable".

Wow, I didn't even notice because I have extensions that strip the referrer header. Excellent.