referers: what for?

[iaiacocoi]

hi everybody
maybe my question is silly but I'm really worried about...

I just checked out that the number of visitors of my pixel post site in just ONE day is changed in a big number. And it's strange because not so much people knew the link adresse until now...

So i just cheched the REFERERS link and I discovered a list of web adresses (inclused google.com) and many others that sound me really like "viagra" and stuff like that...My god..I don't like that at all. And I have really no idea how all this happened..

So anyone could me easy explain:
what are REFERERS?
How can I have control on this adresses..(maybe delete..or what?) and
How comes that, now, when I look on the Google search, I can find my site...and before not..?

I mean, it's good to have visibility on Google of course...but waht about this weird adresses...I think something goes wrong on it..

please help me.

thanks

[raminia]

use Rob's anti referer spam addon:

This addon will create a black list for comments and referes. and cleans up the referer list.

http://www.shiftedexposure.com/anti_spam.zip

[iaiacocoi]

wow

thanks

but sorry..I'm not so into the things to understand..
Could you please explain me better the steps?

I dont'know how to use and how can I install the ADDONS....
:roll:

[Joe[y]]

an addon is simply a php file that you can install in your 'addons' directory. once it's uploaded to your server the file can be used in your admin panel.... under the 'addons' page.

to use this specific addon just enter specific words that appear in the spam and any of these words that display in your referer links will result in the link being deleted.

[iaiacocoi]

you said..
"an addon is simply a php file that you can install in your 'addons' directory. once it's uploaded to your server the file can be used in your admin panel.... under the 'addons' page"

mmmmm :?

sorry but I don't find the way to add anything...
in my ADDONS directory

mmm any suggestion ?

[raminia]

yes!

download the zip file. extract the php file. copy the php file into the addon folder. browse the admin panel >> addons tab. The addon should add some form there.

[er16004]

This is a fantastic addon, BTW.

My question: is there any way to run this as a chron job or something? I'm getting a lot of spam every hour and rather than have to log into the website every few hours, is there a way to set this to run every 30 minutes or so?

Thanks,

Eric

Also, if there's not a way to do this, would you recommend removing links to the referer page? Will that stop the spam?

[Connie]

well Eric,

I always doubted the sense of a referrer-page. It is quite obvious that it is a dull boring list, only interesting for the photoblog-owner, or mostly only interesting for the photoblog-owner...

I took it off at my site, www.photografitti.de, but whenever I want to have a look at it, I can "create" it easily by calling my photoblog in the browser this way :

http://www.yourphotoblog.de/index.php?x=ref

[er16004]

You have a good point, as mine is really only useful to me. I'm using mine to display not only referer links, but my de.lic.ous links & photoblogs.org links. Guess I really don't need this, but if this is cached by Google (or other search engines), what would the ramifications be if I removed it completely? Or rather, what would be the cleanest way to remove the link from my site?

I guess another option, rather than remove that page completely, would be just to remove the referer tag. I think I'll start with that.

[doffer]

The referer is a standard part of the pixelpost system, so removing it from the index.php would probably be the best way... Even though that's a challenge for someone with no php experience... But i don't know nothing about your experience, so it might be a piece of cace to you ;)

The benefit you would get from removing it from the public is that the spambots wont benefit anything from visiting you site... Since their ratings on google depends on the amount of sites linking to their site... You could probably set <meta name="robots" content="no follow"> to avoid some of the spiders from indexing...

It shouldn't be a very big deal for you to show the referers inside the admin either...

[er16004]

... show the referers inside the admin either...

Now this is a good idea.

I was pretty much referring to the [REFERERS] tag that's on my referer page. I wasn't suggesting removing it from Pixelpost, just my site, which I did. I like your idea bout moving it into the admin section, which I will. I don't need it, especially since I have cPanel and receive plenty of stats through there. I just like getting my info in one spot.

I have done a little research into referer spam this morning and found a few good links. One of the best, which has a lot of links, definitions and suggestions is this:

http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2005/01/referrer-spam-proposal

Hope this helps. Even with .htaccess, robots.txt, rel="no follow" and other methods, you're still going to get referer spam. Best practice is not to list your referers.

However, if you need to list them, here's a master blacklist that was started (for use with MoveableType). You could build on this, but it looks like continuous work since there's no way to defeat the spam (or get even).

http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/blacklist.txt

[danimal]

well Eric,

I always doubted the sense of a referrer-page. It is quite obvious that it is a dull boring list, only interesting for the photoblog-owner, or mostly only interesting for the photoblog-owner...

I took it off at my site, www.photografitti.de, but whenever I want to have a look at it, I can "create" it easily by calling my photoblog in the browser this way :

http://www.yourphotoblog.de/index.php?x=ref

What do you mean by "took it off"? Did you delete some code in the "index.php" file? in one of the templates? How'd ya do it? I loath this referer spam stuff.

Did "taking it off" give you back some sort of accuracy i.e. reduce or eliminate the ad-links? I would not mind knowing where people come from and how many people are looking at my photos and I agree that having the link on the page for all to see serves little purpose. Thanks for any help.

http://ohdanny.net

[raminia]

took it off the template file. no need to be there!!! It absorbs those nasty stuff more and more if the they see their link on your site!
It'll be inside the admin area in the next version.

[danimal]

Can I just "comment out" the link by surrounding it with comment tags or should I delete it all together?

[raminia]

comment it out. no difference.
<!-- referer link -->

[danimal]

Arghhh. They are still hittting me. Is it that the "bots" know where my site is, where my index page is? Can I change the name of the referer template? What are they using to still locate me?

[neverdrownout]

by checking my stats through my host i see that a lot of the ref-spam-bots are going directly to sitename.com/index.php?x=ref!

things i've already done to severely cut down fake referrer traffic:

remove the referrer link entirely from the image template
.htaccess,
anti-spam addon in conjunction with planetozh.com's no-refer-spam.php discussed at http://www.pixelpost.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1252&postdays=0&postorder=asc&star t=55,
blocked several KNOWN spammer ip's using host's control panel......

since i don't need it, i've renamed referer_template.html so that the referral page doesn't get pulled up when entered directly http://neverdrownout.com/index.php?x=ref

the fake referal traffic was so bad last week that i was shut down by my host. granted, that was partly due to me using pixelpost 1.3 and only the "refz" solution...

even now that i've upgraded to 1.4.1 and put in all these other blocking methods there's still a ton of fake traffic. is there maybe a way to have 'index.php?x=ref' not exist at all? for instance if a spammer has bots pointed directly to that url it still pulls up a page [not even the ref page after all i've done but still a waste of bandwidth]

basically is there a way to 403 or 404 all traffic to 'index.php?x=ref' ?

[netwalker]

I had the same problem, and it still goes on. I installed another statistics system, in complement from the one that my hosting offers me.

I have 6418 visits this month and 26848 page views on the hosting stats. The other system (power phlogger) shows me 921 visits and 1945 page views. The difference is that the hosting stats get the information from the log files, and the other one it's stand alone with it's own DB. I can't know if the referrer spam it's targeting the index.php?x=ref because in the logs it only appears as index.php

I expected that the spam should calm down with all the changes (no referrer index, no referrer template file, .htaccess file), but it still keeps coming.