Two free scripts designed for bloggers.

  • I hope it’s appropriate to post this here. If not i certainly apologize.

    Hello,

    Before I continue I want everyone to understand that I am not a bot, and this is not a spam that’s sent to thousands of forums. In fact, this is the only forum I’m posting in so far.

    I own a web hosting company. We host many blogs. I am also a blogger myself. I’ve got blogs in both political and general areas. Something I noticed is it’s always kind of fun to post little scripts that do interesting things on your blog. But a lot of them require too many steps and configuration to be simple. About a year ago I decided I wanted to give something back to the bloggers that have helped keep me interested. So I’ve hired the developers and we worked closely to create a couple items. There are many more to come, but these are released now.

    I’ve released two different scripts that are designed for bloggers to put on their site, but are just as well used for any website.

    E-Referrer FREE! https://www.e-places.net/remote_referrer/

    This is an automated reciprocal link page. It monitors your hits that come from other sites, and displays them back with a hyperlink. The end result is any site that links to you gets an automatic link back to them. This is a great idea for blogs because they link back and forth all the time.

    There is a counter on the right side of all referrers. This represents how many times that link has sent you visitors.

    We’ve put a lot of different options in for such a small script. You can change the amount of characters that appear before truncating (cutting) the link. You can select how many referres to list, how many days to retain them and even displaying them by date or hit count.

    IPSpecs FREE! https://www.ipspecs.com/

    IP discovery tool for use on any website (great for security on order forms. Although it doesn’t directly block anything, it does reveal the unique information about the user and shows that his/her information is known).

    We use a database that’s updated monthly with over 2.8 million entries. It’s important to update, as the information changes approximately 5 to 6% per month.

    There are many different templates, and different variables you can use to customize the display.

    Both of these scripts are extremely easy to install. It’s a matter of a single cut and paste of one small script. There’s no configuration or long processes, and you don’t even use the resources from your website server to manage. It’s all handled by our servers.

    Hope someone finds this useful.
    JT

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • “This is an automated reciprocal link page. It monitors your hits that come from other sites, and displays them back with a hyperlink.”

    What an extremely bad idea.
    So a splogger links to me, and your script gives it an autolink FROM my site to it. And along come google and co. who see the link, think it must be a really good site because so many people link to it and they raise it’s PR.
    Or a splogger links and ensures that his dubious products are in the title of the link so generating exposure.
    Or both.

    If you use such a script you want your head felt.

    Thanks, Podz for quickly spotlighting the pitfalls.

    Seems there is much more than the facade that meets the eye. Bloggers beware!

    Thread Starter viruseater

    (@viruseater)

    I understand what you’re saying. to allieviate much of the problems with spam collection we have two filter lists.

    1. a master list that’s maintained by the site and is updated daily. any phrases or words in the list don’t display and the referrer is deleted and blocked.

    2. every user has their own internal filter list to block out any sites that they find offensive. This list accepts words, URLs or phrases.

    The main list has a huge list of obvious blocks. but due to the way it considers a referrer those hundreds and thousands of phony referrers that spammers use to show up are not registered and do not appear. It’s not quite as simple as a HTTP_REFERRER read and then display.

    Your IP address is:
    <?php $visitorip = $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];
    echo “$visitorip”; ?>

    Thread Starter viruseater

    (@viruseater)

    these are small scripts that just for fun on blogs. We’re not trying to give out a street address, just have something that’s interesting.

    reading an ip isn’t hard, the script just does things that you can’t do without looking things up. city, state, country, ISP etc.

    We use the GEOIP database for fraud prevention within our accounting system. We just put this out because it might be interesting for people to see their city and state mentioned when people visit. An ip doesn’t tell you much. We already own the databases.

    so there’s no harm in either script, and it’s just for fun. there’s no cost, no data gathering etc. it’s just a thought for bloggers. truefresco use to offer the service free (the referrer) but went to a pay system after a few years. we decided there was no reason to have to pay for such a simple script so we wrote one from scratch and released it.

    I guess if someone is looking hard enough, they’ll always find a reason to discredit something. even if it’s done before knowing what their discrediting.

    Sorry for making the offer. My intention wasn’t to somehow make anything difficult.

    viruseater, I like the idea myself. Maybe it could support a white list, and only use referrers that were previously authorized.

    Thread Starter viruseater

    (@viruseater)

    Hi Beer,

    Thanks! I don’t see why it couldn’t be done pretty easily to use a white list. My thoughts when putting this together had a lot to do with blogrolling and their blog lists. these lists tend to generate a large amount of hits from sites you’d never noticed were visiting. Anyone can parse logs and review stats, but few do. This way they can see the list right on their site.

    So yes, it could definitely be done, it’s just something we weren’t thinking of. Strange I suppose since we went overboard with the blacklist ?? I’ll take a look but I don’t think it’d be hard at all to add white lists.

    I appreciate the input.

    We all like free scripts and such. But displaying referrer is such a bad idea that it smells. The only good use of using such a script IMHO is to encourage spammers to spam more. Thanks but no thanks!

    In fact I would actively discourage any bloggers to even think about displaying referrer’s. Rather install any of the referrer bouncer plugins available out there.

    once the URI is made public, prepare to get flooded with Referer Spam, unless the page itself displaying the Referer List generated by this “E-Referer” is private and password protected.

    DO NOT download this script if you can’t implement password protection, or you will have more issues with your service provider and/or the overall performance of your site(s). in other words, keep the statistics private.

    the same applies to public display of statistics generated by Webalizer and/or AWStats, especially the “referer list” portion of the statistics.

    statistics pages open to the public are the most prone to Referer Spam, imho. how do i know? i monitor my various Apache server logs, and have seen more than enough using “tail -f”

    once the infestation begins, prepare to generate mod_security filters, Conditional Logging directives and SetEnvIf variables to pipe URI requests with matching Referer Spam to a separate log file, sanitizing your Apache “access_log” file which is used for generating statistics itself.

    the filtering needs to be done at the Apache level, although individual users can probably generate their own mod_security rulesets using .htaccess – the downside? more overhead which slows down page loading abit.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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