Reply #4: Explanation and more instructions

[marcus_b]

I'm a geek. The poster is exactly right.

If you click on a link (and you didn't modify your browsers configuration), the browser will not only request the new page, but it will also tell the web server on which URL the link was clicked.

So, whenever you browse by clicking on links, you are leaving a trail where the destination you go to always receives the information from which source you got there (the "referer").

An analogy: You go to Joe, and ask for some information, "What is the phone number of Sue?". Joe refers you to Bill (a link). You go to Bill (clicking on the link), and approach him, "Hi Bill, Joe sent me. What is the phone number of Sue?" In this example, Joe is the referer.

This happens always, transparently, but it can be switched off or worked around.

The work around is to not click on the link, but to copy the link location and paste it into the URL window. If you enter the URL directly this way, the chain is broken, and no referer information is sent. This works in all browsers.

For Microsoft Internet Explorer (shame on you!), there is no way to switch it off in the browser, but there are tools which allow you to disable the referer logging, for example Norton (Symantec) Internet Security. I don't know Windows very well, so you are on your own here. Better use the work around.

For FireFox and any other browser based on Mozilla, you can enter "about:config" as the URL and thus enter some "hidden" configuration options. Enter "referer" in the filter widget, and then double-click on network.http.sendRefererHeader, and enter the value 0 instead of 1. 0 here means false (do not send the referer), 1 means true.

I have disabled the referer this way for months now, and it works very well. Only very few web sites check the referer header to avoid deep-linking (a site linking directly to some file on another site). In this case, you would get an obscure error message. But for most web sites (practically all I am using), it works just fine, and it protects your privacy.

BTW: The web server gets not only the referer URL, but also your IP address, the time of access, the browser you are using ("user agent string") and a bunch of other information.

The referer is the easiest way to remove biased votes in a poll. A more complex approach could be analyzing the timing of votes for the same option. If there is a peak of similar votes (for example shortly after the announcement was made here in the forum), the server could filter out most of those votes alltogether. But that is substantially more work, and it is unlikely that they would bother. They would rather just pull the whole poll and don't publish the result.

edit: typo