Wander Console 0.6.0 is now available. This is the sixth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website discover interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander/. To learn how it works and how to set it up on your own website, see the project README.

The main change in this release is the removal of support for the `via` referral query parameter, which was added to recommended URLs so that website owners could identify visits coming from a Wander Console in their access logs. The `via` query parameter was introduced in version 0.4.0 in response to community demand, but it turned out to be a misfeature. Some websites refuse to serve web pages when arbitrary query parameters are added to URLs. Although it was possible to turn this feature off via configuration, I would rather not keep a dubious feature that may prevent some pages from loading successfully. This feature has now been completely removed. See this excellent article by Chris Morgan to learn more about why adding arbitrary query parameters to URLs is a bad idea. Commit b26d77c has more details about the removal of this feature.

Apart from this change, there are a few minor user interface adjustments and fixes. See the changelog for more details.

If you own a personal website but have not set up a Wander Console yet, I suggest that you consider setting one up. You can see what it looks like by visiting mine at /wander/. To set up your own, follow the installation instructions in the README. It only involves copying two files to your web server, so the installation is very straightforward.

Also, check out our new community page called Wander Console Network. This page shows a recent snapshot of all known Wander Console instances along with the web pages they recommend. We have an IRC channel too at #wander on `irc.libera.chat` in case you are looking for a place to hang out with the community.

Update on 09 May 2026: See the post I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs for an account of how the misguided referral query string feature was added and how it was removed.