| Re: Referrals |
Wed, 02 March 2005 00:13   |
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I didn't write the forum software so this is merely my best educated guess at how it works:
You post the url of a forum message somewhere, to someone, presumably because the answer to something they asked about is found in that post and/or thread.
Said url might look like:
http://starsautohost.org/sahforum/index.php?t=msg&th=225 7&rid=78&S=bdbe29f5f997f47390f8e88fd6a11b4f
or:
http://starsautohost.org/sahforum/index.php?t=tree&goto= 19168&rid=21&S=868de0334909d8b29eeaf0e0af980ba3
All that weird stuff after index.php? is information, including(but not limited to), which post you're linking to, the user ID of the person viewing the post when the url was copied from the address bar, and even the layout style of the forum when it was viewed. This is why the two links above are different, even though they're both links to the same post.
When an unregistered(or simply not logged in) user clicks on someone else's link to a forum post the software takes note of the user ID in the link and uses that as the referrer if the user chooses to register during that browser session.
It also explains why when I click a link to a forum post, from someone who uses a different layout to mine, I get confused briefly. 
I suspect users with a lot of refferals unknown to them have posted links to forum posts on rec.computers.games.stars. Certainly we get enough links posted here to usenet posts.
If you want a specific (non-registered) person as a referral, simply give them the url (from the address bar) to any forum post and tell them to click "register" once they're there.
The question now is: Is that enough posts for a fence? 
[Updated on: Wed, 02 March 2005 00:18] Report message to a moderator
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