May 12, 2026
Link tags, hurt feelings
Referer Reality
People are fighting over mystery link tags, manners, and whether the internet should say who sent you
TLDR: Robin Sloan says extra link tags can be a polite way to tell websites who sent them visitors, especially now that many apps hide that information. Commenters turned it into a mini-war over privacy, usefulness, and whether anyone should be helping websites track traffic in the first place.
A surprisingly spicy internet etiquette fight has broken out over one tiny detail in web links: those extra bits added at the end that tell a site where visitors came from. Writer Robin Sloan defended adding a custom tag to outgoing links so shops and site owners can see, in plain English, that he sent the traffic. His argument is simple: many clicks now come from email apps and phone apps that don’t pass along the usual “who sent you here” signal, so without that extra note, visits just look random.
But the comments? Absolutely not calm. One camp was baffled that anyone would voluntarily help other websites track people better. As one commenter basically asked: why are you doing free analytics labor for strangers? Another group pushed back on Sloan’s claim that most visitors now come through apps and email, with one blunt response boiling down to: “I hate native apps.” In other words, the community didn’t just debate the practice — they challenged the whole reality behind it.
Then came the site owner at the center of the drama, Chris Morgan, popping in like a man who accidentally set off a neighborhood fireworks show: he said he “didn’t imagine” banning query strings would stir up so much interest. There was also some classic nerd humor, including a “bobby tables” joke about malicious inputs and general disbelief that YouTube of all places can choke on unexpected link extras. The vibe: half manners lecture, half tracking panic, half pedantic slap-fight — yes, that’s three halves, and the comments would probably argue about that too.
Key Points
- •Robin Sloan wrote in response to Chris Morgan’s decision to reject requests containing appended query strings.
- •Sloan argues that many website visits now come from email clients and apps that do not send a `Referrer` header.
- •He appends `utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me` to outbound links so destination sites can identify the traffic source.
- •Sloan says he does not use analytics on his own sites and describes the custom parameter as a way to make incoming traffic legible to site operators.
- •He notes that some websites, including YouTube, do not handle unexpected query strings well, so he keeps an exceptions list and added `chrismorgan.info` to it.