[ php-blog-Feature Requests-1460986 ] Verbose Referrer handling

Feature Requests item #1460986, was opened at 2006-03-29 21:42
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by garvinhicking
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Category: Administrative functions
Group: None
Status: Open
Priority: 2
Submitted By: John Goerzen (jgoerzen)
Assigned to: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Summary: Verbose Referrer handling

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.

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>Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-03-30 16:08

Message:
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Maybe you're not missing something really - the suppress
mechanism is just a lot complicated and weird. It's from the
very early times of s9y where I did not yet take part in
development, and I never got a hang of that code.

And since referrer tracking was uninteresting for me, I
never investigated this code, so I still don't fully
understand it...

Best regards,
Garvin

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Comment By: John Goerzen (jgoerzen)
Date: 2006-03-30 15:21

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I agree.  It's still not adding up.  flotsam set up a page
at http://arnor.art-core.org/test.html and had several
people pull it up, then click on the link to my blog. 
Nothing showed up in the referrers table from that site.

However, the suppress table recorded a hit from four
different IPs already, over the space of 10 minutes.

After I followed that link several times myself, then the
referrer showed up.  But with a count of only 1.

It seems like it wants there to be several hits from a
certain IP for a given referrer, AND multiple different IPs
from that referrer hitting the blog, before it will even
consider listing referrers.  It seems this would be pretty
hard to achieve; I'd very rarely get multiple hits from a
single IP from a single referrer.

Or maybe I'm missing something.

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Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-03-30 15:03

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I've changed your report to a feature request, since it's
not a bug but intentional. What you want is to have no
suppress queue. Maybe someone will implement this in the future.

I think Shrikee has worked on the statistics plugin to offer
alternate referrer tracking. Also, using a tool like Google
Analytics or a weblog analyzer seems to be what you want to
use right now - at least until someone gets down to develop
verbose referrer analysis in s9y.

flotsam: Please read what I wrote in my first comment.

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

Comment By: flotsam (flotsam)
Date: 2006-03-30 14:58

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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.

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Comment By: John Goerzen (jgoerzen)
Date: 2006-03-30 14:52

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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 09:21

Message:
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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.

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

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