Allow referral in query string of URL

[kevinmickey]

It would be nice to use the referral in the query string of a URL. In order to have backward compatibility, this could be optional. This would have several benefits.

• Could attach to any URL, so no need to set a redirect_to. Users can decide which url to send, and just add their referral parameter.
• Might improve SEO, because links are pointing to same destination, just with different query parameters. (Although the crawler can probably handle the redirects)
• Improves transparency, because a user can see where they are going to be redirected to.
• Most importantly, reduces link rot. If you remove the pinax referral app, you still have a bunch of referral links out in the wild. Ideally, the links would work but just have an extra ref parameter. Instead, currently they would likely fail or require a patch.

In order to implement, check out: https://github.com/byteweaver/django-referral/blob/master/referral/middleware.py I think the important pinax-referrals code would be moved from a view to middleware.

[ossanna16]

Thanks so much for your suggestion @kevinmickey! Any thoughts about this @paltman and @jtauber?

[surinderdeveloper]

Is there any update for this enhancement? I am using this lib from last one year and now I need this feature. @ossanna16, @kevinmickey

[KatherineMichel]

@surinderdeveloper This issue was opened quite a while before I began maintaining Pinax, but I'm not aware of an update.

[surinderdeveloper]

Thanks @KatherineMichel for replying. I saw the documentation and It is not yet updated. Could you please suggest to me how can achieve it? I am already using it but now there is requirement to add referral in the query string of a URL

[KatherineMichel]

@surinderdeveloper I think @kevinmickey might have a better idea atm of how to do that, since he suggested it.