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I have an application which records users visits. None of these visits are directly accessed, 100% of these visits are referred from another site.
I am passing $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] through to the database. Approximately 35% of the logged entrees pass a referer, the rest are blank.
Is there a reason for this?
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Some web browsers give their users the option to turn off referrer fields in the request header. Most web browsers do not send the referrer field when they are instructed to redirect using the "Refresh" field. This does not include some versions of Opera and many mobile web browsers.
Using HTTP_REFERER isn't reliable, its value is dependent on the HTTP Referer header sent by the browser or client application to the server and therefore can't be trusted because it can be manipulated. Regarding the Referer header, section 15.1.
There might be several reasons why the referer URL would be blank. It will/may be empty when the enduser: entered the site URL in browser address bar itself. visited the site by a browser-maintained bookmark.
In HTTP networking, typically on the World Wide Web, referer spoofing (based on a canonised misspelling of "referrer") sends incorrect referer information in an HTTP request in order to prevent a website from obtaining accurate data on the identity of the web page previously visited by the user.
There are a couple of number of reasons why HTTP_REFERER might be blank.
window.open, window.location and even setting target="_blank" in anchors or meta refresh.file_get_contents, fopen and other similar functions in other languages will probably not set a referer request.There are probably more situations when this could happen, I'll update if I can think of anything that seems reasonable.
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