How not to do URL redirects (… the way Quora does)

Best I can tell, there is zero incentive for Quora (or any other site, for that matter) to care. Their current redirect logic in no way hurts their user experience.<p>Right now they protect their users' privacy. What benefit do they realize by providing their users' viewing history to other sites?<p>I personally think that the referer header was never a good idea. I disable it in my browser, and appreciate sites that do right by their users with privacy protecting default behaviors.

I hate to crash the party, but why is the premise that "overriding links is absolutely okay" taken for granted?<p>Says who? Google and their `/url`? Facebook and their `l.php`?

This is probably <i>not</i> the case, but is it possible that Quora is intentionally stripping the referer header? Duck Duck Go does just this in the interest of user privacy: why should site X know where I came from and what I was searching? <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html</a> Seems unlikely in this case but possible.<p>Incidentally, it seems that encrypted.google.com does this but not regular google. EDIT: This happens for all https-&#62;http requests, it's not a google feature (TIL).

I don't see how this could be a result of simple mistake. There doesn't seem to be any reason to do redirects this way except hiding the referrer.

It's most likely done intentionally to protect against leaking the clicker's identity. See the issue Facebook had back then: <a href="http://www.benedelman.org/news/052010-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.benedelman.org/news/052010-1.html</a>

<i>We let you create surveys and display those on your website in a “targeted” manner</i><p>A better title for your article would have been:<p><i>why to never rely on referers</i><p>(which can be blocked or purposely malformed)

Would we get the right referer if 302 is done via quora redirect?

Since you are a hosted service, you could periodically loop through all of the Quora redirect links you've received and resolve them. This might be against Quora's TOS, though.<p>I believe Twitter does this with URL shortener links posted in tweets.

Has anyone asked on Quora, why Quora does this?

So Quora works for you now? That must be nice...