Track how many people use `from-referrer` and end up with an error message

[mikenikles]

While https://gitpod.io/from-referrer/ is a convenient way to create an "Open in Gitpod" button, it is broken in browsers like Brave and results in a bad user experience.

I'd like to track how many people end up seeing the error message saying "No Referrer Found" (source code).
I'd also like to track how many people successfully get redirected based on the referrer header.

This will help me decide whether or not to write documentation for from-referrer.

[jldec]

I wonder how trackable this right now. Don't Brave users without referrer also block segment with a privacy blocker?

[AlexTugarev]

It's not just the brave browser.

Recent versions of Safari.app won't work either, because the from-referrer url is missing the path part.

Perhaps we should just drop that feature.

[mikenikles]

I wanted to make a data-driven decision to drop it, but completely agree. While it's a really nice feature to have and would make sense for the template-* repos, I'm hesitant to add it to the documentation because it is a bad user experience for anyone who is cautious of their online privacy and uses Brave or as Alex said, newer versions of Safari.

Measuring how many people end up on that "No Referrer Found" page would give us insight into how big of an issue it is. It's not come up much in the community, but it could just be that people don't report it or use the Gitpod browser extension.

[shaal]

TIL - private repos cannot utilize from-referrer.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.