Intended Behavior!(?) - Referrer displays as "none" if referrer_domain == websiteDomain

[mattegan]

Hi there! First time Umami user here! Was a little confused at my dashboard's referrer stats after browsing around my website for a bit and racking up some page view events (clicking around links within my domain). All of these views had referrers in my dashboard showing as as None. I tried:

• First checking that my referrer-policy header was not causing any issues
• Set a breakpoint on the fetch() call to /api/send and saw that, indeed, Umami was having no trouble grabbing document.referrer while browsing around my domain
• Checked the website_event table in Postgres and found the referrer information there! So it wasn't getting lost..

umami=# select created_at, url_path, referrer_path,referrer_domain from website_event ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 20;
         created_at         |                      url_path                       |            referrer_path            |   referrer_domain
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------
 2024-02-21 15:06:48.104-08 | /entry/obligatory-first-post                        | /log/list                           | matt.egan.me
 2024-02-21 14:29:25.785-08 | /entry/obligatory-first-post                        | /log/list                           | matt.egan.me
 2024-02-21 14:11:49.53-08  | /entry/obligatory-first-post                        | /log/list                           | matt.egan.me

• So, I did a little digging in the frontend code and found this code, which seems to filter out "referrer" data if they match the website domain

So... okay, while writing this in the Q&A forum, I finally thought to ask myself what the "Domain" field in the website setup was actually used for -- which led me to the very bottom of this page, where it's explained very clearly how the domain is used to filter the referrers! So egg on my face! I appreciate the opportunity for the deep dive into postgres and HTTP headers and whatnot.

Maybe it would be a little clearer if somewhere in the "add website" flow this was mentioned, or a little bit of cautionary text in the vicinity of the "referrers" column on the dashboard? (Even more amazing would be a checkbox that allows you to include or exclude).

Anyway -- just thought I'd post here so nobody else goes down the same rabbit hole as I did -- I couldn't find anything quite similar to my experience in the issues here, and maybe it's my ignorance is due to my lack of experience with analytics tools, etc.

Thanks!
Matt