I’m trying to understand a referrer/direct traffic issue on InfinityFree related to the ?i=1 parameter. what happens here is, A visitor comes from an external site/search engine to a normal clean URL like:
https://example.com/page/
But InfinityFree seems to automatically redirect or append:
https://example.com/page/?i=1
After this happens, a large amount of traffic in analytics starts showing as “Direct” instead of preserving the original referrer/source.
I already:
use Cloudflare
use HTTPS
use canonical URLs
use clean trailing slash redirects
use strict-origin-when-cross-origin
avoid HTTP redirects
minimized redirect chains
My main question:
Is there ANY way on InfinityFree to preserve the original referrer when the ?i=1 redirect/check happens? Or is the referrer already lost before the request even reaches my site because the InfinityFree security layer handles it first?
The security challenge does a redirect with Javascript, and there is no way to preserve the original referrer with a Javascript redirect. The referrer header will be set to the page that generated the redirect, which will be your own site.
I recognize that this will cause problems for analytics. Unfortunately, the security challenge is not optional, and there is no way to solve this with the security challenge in place.
Although it would be possible, that would mean disabling the security system that keeps everyone’s sites somewhat protected from bot attacks (its not perfect, but it works)
There have been many requests made to have this removed, and all have been met with the same answer from admin, that it’s not going to happen.
Noo I meant it would be great if the JS security redirect could somehow preserve the original referrer/source instead of turning traffic into “Direct”
Not asking to disable the protection system itself, just wondering if there could ever be a way for the challenge flow to pass the original source through for analytics/SEO purposes.
