BSQ Sitestats has joined the war on spam
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006I was planning on freezing BSQ Sitestats for the upcoming 2.2.x release, but I started getting attacked by porn spammers last week on my demo site. NOT COOL. Battling scripts with custom SQL commands is no fun, so I came up with a few different solutions that you will all enjoy:
Banned Referrer Words
Most of the spam had certain naughty words in the referrer URL which could easily be found with strpos, so there is now a configuration parameter on the Filters tab for banned referrer words. This will prevent future infractions and will be applied when you scrub the data.
Stats Scrubbing
Banning for the future is great, but what about my existing stats? Have no fear. The back end now has a menu item called Scrub Stats, which will actually go through your banned referrer and ignored IPs lists and delete all of the relevant records from the BSQ database, sending them to the bit bucket in the sky.
Delete hits from IPs on the Fly
If you’ve noticed, every IP in the back end links to an info page about that IP. Now there’s an extra [X] after the link that lets you remove all hits for this IP from the database. This lets you remove yourself or anybody else who is clogging up your stats. One easy click, and that IP address is history.
The above features are highly effective. I was able to clean up the bsq demo site in a matter of minutes. Anybody ready to use BSQ Sitestats 2.2.x yet? Send a comment if you want to play with the alpha.
September 7th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Hi Brent,
We would like to be alpha testers.
kind regards,
Harry
September 7th, 2006 at 8:58 am
I’ll try to release an alpha .zip tonight. I’ll be on vacation all weekend, but the zip should work fine for you. It’s running on http://bsqdemo.bs-squared.com and working great.
September 7th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
@Harry Splinter - Wow! That is one of the NICEST Joomla! websites I have seen!
Good stuff, Brent. I will take a look, too. Have a great vacation!
September 8th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
@Amy
- thanks. It was my first project together with an Joomla fanatic.
@Brent. Thanks we’ll have a go!
September 10th, 2006 at 4:49 am
@Brent could not find the alpha on de sourceforge pages. U were 2 busy I assume.
September 10th, 2006 at 5:36 am
@harry
He didn’t as there were some major changes and feared if there was a big bug, he couldn’t answer or post a fix soon enough.
Kind regards,
Michiel
September 10th, 2006 at 8:09 am
Yeah. What michiel said :). I’ll be home in a few hours though. Pehaps then…