But you see that anyway from access.log or whatever your server supports and dashboard/analytics shows it anyway? What's the benefit of adding origin to query string?
Some web pages don't send referrers by making all links rel="noreferrer". Mastodon used to do this by default, though now they've changed their stance.
Links opened from non-browser apps don't have any referrer information either. E.g. if somebody shares your link on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram.
Email clients may also strip out referrers, but I'm not entirely sure about this one.
If people read your work via RSS readers, you'll almost certainly not get any referrers. Unless it's a web-based reader like Feedly.
My website gets a lot of traffic marked as "Direct / None" by Plausible. I suspect this is traffic from RSS readers or Mastodon, but I can't be sure. A few times I've considered adding a "?ref=RSS" to all URLs served to RSS readers and "?ref=Mastodon" to everything I post on Mastodon. But like the author of this post, I feel uncomfortable tracking my readers like this.
I see where (both of you) are coming from, and I'm very privacy conscious (=paranoid) myself, but in this case, as a user, I wouldn't actually mind. It seems to me you would be tracking flows instead of users, which is fine in my book. Now, including Google fonts on every page, using their tag manager, analytics, captcha... That gives me the creeps. Waaay too much information about each and every user. But generic origin query params? Yeah, ok. :shrug:
Adblockers like umatrix have options like "Spoof Referer header". I have this setting enabled, so adding tracking query strings to URLs would go against my user preference.
Some web pages don't send referrers by making all links rel="noreferrer". Mastodon used to do this by default, though now they've changed their stance.
Links opened from non-browser apps don't have any referrer information either. E.g. if somebody shares your link on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram.
Email clients may also strip out referrers, but I'm not entirely sure about this one.
If people read your work via RSS readers, you'll almost certainly not get any referrers. Unless it's a web-based reader like Feedly.
My website gets a lot of traffic marked as "Direct / None" by Plausible. I suspect this is traffic from RSS readers or Mastodon, but I can't be sure. A few times I've considered adding a "?ref=RSS" to all URLs served to RSS readers and "?ref=Mastodon" to everything I post on Mastodon. But like the author of this post, I feel uncomfortable tracking my readers like this.