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abacquer
Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 193
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Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 6:46 pm Post subject: Suggestion For Dealing with Referer Spam |
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John and other BlogHarbor subscribers:
I just had a great idea. I have no idea whether or not it is something blogharbor can implement but it would be "ab fab" as our UK brethren might say. It's three suggestions really, but implementing any of them would help.
(1) Please group referers in the site stats by domain (everything between the first "//" and the subsequent "/" or "?" or "&") Then when one clicks the "referrers" link, one would see something like this:
140: admin.blogharbor.com
97: images.google.com
40: google.com
30: search.aol.com
15: www.hot-milf-xxx-action.com
6: miscellaneous
The "miscellaneous" would represent those domains which had 1 hit or less, all grouped together. This would make it easy to separate out legitimate links from search engine queries and of course, spam. Then if you actually wanted to see the referrers for a particular domain, you click that domain in the list and get taken to the "traditional" referrer stats, but it only shows the stats for that domain. This modification alone would go a long way to (a) dealing with referrer spam and (b) making the referrer display more useful.
(2) Here's where it would get really cool. Give me the ability, right on the domain-grouped referrer page (with a checkbox next to each domain) to identify the domains I don't care to see results for. Either these simply then are not shown, or they are all grouped into one category at the bottom ("IGNORED"). I like the latter, because it lets you still account for those hits, and also gives you a hook where the user can click if they want to, say, start tracking some of the stuff they were previously ignoring. (Click ignored, opens a summary page of ignored domains, uncheck the ones you don't want to ignore, etc.)
(3) Provide an RSS feed or another way for me to get my referrers in a more portable format. If I want to do some analysis of my referrers, presently they aren't provided in any readily accessible format for importing into say, a database or other tool. At the very least, this would allow me to get a dump of my referrers which I could then process with tools of my own and get the filtering that I want that way.
Well them's my ideas. For what it's worth.
-- Chuck
PS: John, just noticed yesterday there is an RSS feed for these boards! Thanks! _________________ -- Abacquer, A.K.A. Chuck Seggelin |
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qureus Guest
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Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 7:29 pm Post subject: abacquer |
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what abacquer said!
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artatcomo
Joined: 10 Jun 2004 Posts: 18 Location: Saint Paul, MN
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Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 9:15 pm Post subject: |
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I saw an interesting read over at Kuro5hin last week ranting about referal spam and what might be done about it.. http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2005/2/14/02558/3376 I am afraid it was over my head, But had some interesting information. I am getting up to nine pages of referrals per day and have resolved that looking through them all is too depressing.
http://art.blogharbor.com/blog |
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abacquer
Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 193
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Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 10:42 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, I don't think BlogHarbor uses Apache as it's webserver(s). Either that or I think I remember John saying once that we don't have or don't have access to .htaccess files. _________________ -- Abacquer, A.K.A. Chuck Seggelin |
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john Site Admin
Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434
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Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 7:11 am Post subject: Re: Suggestion For Dealing with Referer Spam |
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Quote: | I just had a great idea. I have no idea whether or not it is something blogharbor can implement but it would be "ab fab" as our UK brethren might say. It's three suggestions really, but implementing any of them would help. |
Thanks for your suggestions abacquer. We're working on this issue from a couple of fronts. The first phase will be for us to prevent some of these obvious spams from ever getting to the server, that's something we'll take care of behind the scenes. The second phase will come later, and give you some additional options for managing these issues as they arise. |
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john Site Admin
Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434
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Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 7:17 am Post subject: |
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artatcomo wrote: | I saw an interesting read over at Kuro5hin last week ranting about referal spam and what might be done about it.. |
Those techniques are applicable for folks who have installed their own blogging software on their own server or shared server hosting. We do not provide the capability for you to control the htaccess files which this article refers to. |
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john Site Admin
Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434
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Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 7:19 am Post subject: |
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abacquer wrote: | Yeah, I don't think BlogHarbor uses Apache as it's webserver(s). Either that or I think I remember John saying once that we don't have or don't have access to .htaccess files. |
The server is actually Apache, but you're right about inability to use htaccess files. |
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