When redirecting users from a legacy website to the new one, what is the best way to detect whether or not to show them a custom welcome message?

Question

Say you have a legacy website running on an old code-base that offers certain functionality. The successor website is up and running, providing all the old functionality and more. For some time, there has been an HTML link on the old site pointing to the new one, for those users that care to click over.

Now, the legacy site is reaching its end of life, and you want to automatically redirect users to the new site, for example via a 301 or 302 redirect. However, when a user encounters this redirect, you want to also display a friendly message on the new site welcoming them and explaining why they are not seeing the old version.

When the user clicks an HTML link, the HTTP_REFERER header is populated, and the welcome message can be triggered via that value. However it appears that the same is not true when using 3XX redirect codes.

The top Google hit for this issue has this to say: "HTTP 1.1 specification states it clearly: if a 3XX code is given, no Referer value is passed. (eventualy, the URL that pointed to 3XX site)." (http://www.usenet-forums.com/apache-web-server/37811-how-set-referer-redirect.html#post145986)

However I could not find this statement in a quick read through the spec (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616).

Can anyone suggest the proper way to achieve this functionality?

Note: This is not meant to be an all-encompassing solution. We understand that some clients don't even send the HTTP_REFERER header for privacy reasons, but for the sake of argument, let's ignore that use case.

Answer 1

Could you just redirect them to a specific launch page? Like if try try to visit http://oldsite.com/desired/page, just send them to http://newsite.com/welcome?nextpage=/desired/page. The welcome page could show the message and then pass them over to the content. Alternatively, you could send them right to the new page with a ?show_welcome=true in the URL.

Answer 2

First, This should be a 301, not a 302 redirect. Your redirection is permanent, so you want to indicate that. As to how to indicate the redirect, just add a parm to the url. Instead of redirecting to http://www.newsite.com redirect them to http://www.newsite.com?FromOldSite=Y

Answer 3

Not sure how you plan to redirect your users, but if you don't want to "ugly" up your URL, you might just set your own custom header when hitting the old site and then check for it at the new.