Thanks Michael, I guess referrer fields could be used as 'adverts', as
you say. If particular referrers were occuring quite often I suppose
that I could use REFREFEXCLUDE and REFSITEEXCLUDE to exclude them from
the report. If I understand the Analog manual correctly, REFEXCLUDE
would exclude the offending logfile lines from *all* or the reports (a
bit like grep-ing out the lines from the logfile before running
analog), which is not what I want.
It seems a bit strange that the offending lines in the file imply a
REAL commercial browser (IE5, Netscape) was being used, rather than a
hacker's special. I don't recall there being any settings in commercial
browsers to set a value for the referrer. How would someone set a
specific referrer value in a commercial browser?
Incidentally, most entries in the log have the 'spurious' referrer only
for the *first* page request - subsequent requests (such as image files
which appear on the first page) all have the 'correct' referrer field
(one of my pages). This might imply a commercial browser (IE5,Netscape)
being fooled into providing the wrong referrer (maybe by javascript)
the first time it arrives at your site, but then once it gets your
first page it then behaves normally. I can't think of any other reason
for this only to occur for the first page request.
I did find one user who consistently provided an incorrect referrer for
ALL requests to my site. Needless to say this increased its ranking in
the referrers report considerably!
Thanks
Colin
--- Michael Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Nothing *forces* the browser to give you an accurate referrer. The
> ncint:openpanel one is certainly some kind of local Javascript
> utility or
> something of that nature. The freeserve one could ... well, I don't
> have a
> ready answer for that one. The fantomaster one looks like an
> advertisement
> for "fantomBrowser", to be perfectly honest.
>
> I've seen jokers put in referrers to porn sites sometimes. I suppose
> if
> you're looking for cheap entertainment, that could be funny. Most of
> the
> time, people fixated on privacy will just not give you a referrer at
> all.
>
> Hope that helped. Sometimes there just aren't happy answers.
> Michael
>
> ColinB wrote:
>
> > I am finding several entries in my server log which carry referrer
> > fields which do not contain links to our site. For example:
> >
> > webcachehp6a.cache.pol.co.uk - - [25/Mar/2001:16:38:01 +0100] "GET
> > /restaurant/list.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 39772
> > "http://www.freeserve.com/plus" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0;
> > Windows 98; DigExt; WHSmith Online V1.12)"
> >
> > ymir.contextbase.com - - [21/Mar/2001:06:15:03 +0000] "GET
> > /midland-red/ HTTP/1.0" 200 8986
> > "http://fantomaster.com/faregister.html" "Mozilla/4.0
> (fantomBrowser)"
> >
> > Both of these referrer pages do not contain links to our site, so
> how
> > do they appear in the log as "reffering" pages? If a user happened
> to
> > be viewing one of these pages and then *manually* typed-in a URL
> for
> > our site, would that be counted as a referring page?
> >
> > Also I often get one or two entries like this:
> >
> > ppp-11b-130.3com.telinco.net - - [25/Mar/2001:19:06:21 +0100] "GET
> /
> > HTTP/1.0" 200 13934 "ncint:openpanel?name=url" "Mozilla/3.04
> > (compatible; NCBrowser/2.35; ANTFresco/2.17; RISC OS-NC 5.13
> > Laz1UK1309)"
> >
> > where the referring page is "ncint:openpanel?name=url". Any idea
> what
> > is causing this?
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Colin
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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> >
>
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