Handling Wikka Referrers


There is much room to improve the current referrer handling scripts. Here's a couple of ideas, some more urgent, other merely optional. Comments are welcome.


Wikis are in general prone to attacks by spambots that use massive linking to increase a domain's visibility in SERPs. It would be useful if we had the possibility to respond to such attacks by mass-blacklisting spamming sites. Possible solutions include the use of wildcards for matching particular URL patterns or selection boxes to select multiple domains to be blacklisted.

Most of the visits to Wikis with rich content come from search engines. Several log analyzer allow the user to mask/unmask search engines from the referrer list.

Currently, Wikka allows grouping referrers by domain name. An interesting feature of advanced log analyzers (like the GPL-licensed webalizer) is that they allow referrers to be grouped on the basis of more complex URL patterns. Grouping allows to display, say, all the referrers from google.* on a single line. The user should be given the possibility to toggle referrers-grouping on/off. Beside search engines, referrers-grouping might also be interesting for extracting wikis from the list of referrers (often, the presence of camelcase patterns in the URL is a good indicator of the referrer as a Wiki). And - why not - to extract Wikka sites referring to this server :)

Advanced log analyzers allow the extraction of keywords from referrers. This allows smart statistics to be built on the keywords or keyword-groups that maximize a site's visibility. But this probably leads us too far from the needs of a Wiki referrer analyzer...

-- DarTar



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