Hello,
I do get a lot of referer spam from russia at the moment. It seems totally pointless to me, because beside me, no one else can see the piwik statistics containing this referrers. As my site has very little visitors, the very most visitors are coming from that spammer. The spam comes from different IPs and with different client strings.
What is the best that I can do, to get rid of this spam? Any idea?
kind regards,
Torsten
try using htaccess on you web server block ip ranges and look after about 95% of spammers from russia ukrain and china
Hi,
as the spam comes from a lot of different addresses, I think I can not go this way. An other approach could be to simply ignore all http requests coming from the main page of a domain. This would fit for all referer spam requests I get and the number of false positives should be minimal. So I would ignore foo.ru, but not foo.ru/content. And of cause I would have to take my own domain into account, so dungeonpilot.com would not be filtered.
Does this sound reasonable?
kind regards,
Torsten
That sounds like a usuable solution but be aware spammers will eventually learn and adjust to this. Thats why i recommened the IP method you can get the number down dramatcially by doing a whois of each IP then block the entire range. In a week you ll have most of the offenders and block all their requests. There are even sites that have pre defined htaccess ips for countries like that you can use right away.
Hi lesjokolat,
thank you.
Can you please post that you experience referrer spam, in this ticket: Implement a default Referrer spam blacklist · Issue #2268 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub
Ok, I’ve added my opinion to the ticket.