Know how to create cookies? Have a question

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10
Hello,

I'm hoping to pick the brain of someone who understands cookies.

I'm curious if it's beyond the limitations of Cookie programming/creation for the cookie to tell me the website a visitor was at right before coming to my site.

I'm not talking about what site referred them, but rather simply the site visited before mine. If you know how to do this and do freelance please lmk.

Thank you
#programming #cookies #create #question
  • Unfortunately it's not possible... The only way to do stuff like that is to read HTTP_REFERER variable from HTTP headers and even then the information is many times missing or not correct. For example if the user comes to your site by clicking a banner ad or via javascript link using IE you won't get any usable referrer data about the website he/she was last visiting.

    I was once programming a tool which would've hugely benefited from that kind of feature so I did lots of digging and finally accepted that it just isn't possible.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • thank you for replying.

      I thought it was certainly possible because tracking of referring sites can be done...

      What if there was an index of recognized cookies that a script could pull from so that x% of the time it was accurate?
  • It's still not possible because other domains can't access cookies set by 3rd party domains. It would be a security issue or a bug if it would be possible.

    Direct quote from one site because I can't post links yet:

    "If the domains don’t share a higher level domain (like foo.example.com and bar.example.com have the same second level domain example.com), there is – or better: there should be – no way of sharing cookies."

    Edit: Yes I know, it sucks!
    • [1] reply
    • That is so strange considering services like analytics can show referrers, keywords used and search engine referrals based on what I thought was cookies.
      • [1] reply
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