[ php-blog-Bugs-1460986 ] Referrer handling broken

Bugs item #1460986, was opened at 2006-03-29 23:42
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by flotsam
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=542822&aid=1460986&group_id=75065

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Category: Administrative functions
Group: None
Status: Closed
Resolution: Invalid
Priority: 1
Submitted By: John Goerzen (jgoerzen)
Assigned to: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Summary: Referrer handling broken

Initial Comment:
Hello,

I have just switched my blog at
http://changelog.complete.org/ over to S9Y.  I've
noticed that only one referrer was appearing in the
Statistics screen.  After investigation, I found that
indeed only one referrer (a hit from a google search)
was in the referrers table.  I followed inbound links
to my blog -- both the homepage and various stories --
from different sources.  Still nothing showed up in
that table.

A little digging revealed this thread:

http://www.s9y.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4074&highlight=referrer

I checked the suppress table, and sure enough, 12 rows.

Now I have some comments about that.

First, referrers are never presented to the public on
my site, so I don't care about referrer spam at all.

Secondly, a lot of legitimate hits visit the site only
once in a week or whatever, and I'd like to know about
them.

Third, I intentionally hit the site several times from
some of these places, with a single IP, within a few
minutes, and still no referrer showed up.

winkiller on IRC was able to confirm the bug on
1.0beta2 but believed it does not exist in SVN trunk.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Comment By: flotsam (flotsam)
Date: 2006-03-30 16:58

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=1302710

I agree, something must be broken - I set up a special page
on another domain and followed a link to this blog an dmy
own installation of beta2 and got no referrers at all.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Comment By: John Goerzen (jgoerzen)
Date: 2006-03-30 16:52

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=491567

I understand, but what I'm trying to say is that this blocks
a lot of legitimate referrers, and I don't care about the
spam.  I get a lot of one-off hits from various google
searches, etc.  It would be nice to at least have a
togglable option to disable the referrer blocking.  Better
yet -- how about making the referrer filtering a plugin that
could be removed at will?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-03-30 11:21

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=473563

In fact this is not a bug, but intentional prevention of
referrer spamming from a single IP.

The suppress list only shows a referrer if it comes at least
2 times for a different IP.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=542822&aid=1460986&group_id=75065


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