Referrers....

kygarden

Looking at the stats page, referrers....I seem to have some fishy web sites linking to my photos. Is there any way for me to stop this? I mean like sites that when you visit them, they put up some bogus virus scan thing and so on. Sites that are up to no good. Most of the rest of the referrer stuff I recognize. There are just some that are clearly up to no good.

Anything I can do about it other than stop allowing the photo sharing links/external links? (which would defeat the purpose of having my site anyway)

leftquark

I agree with kygarden's comment.

I'm going to piggy back on this and say that I think the referrer's is severly lacking. The referrals I'm getting cover only ~1% of the hits to my photos. If we take out all the fishy websites the referrals cover only 0.08% of my hits! That's not very helpful!

I would assume that the server logs have some kind of referral information for each of the hits? I know some sites use the rel=nofollow (like all the links to my photos on flickr) but perhaps there's some workaround so that clicks from Facebook, Flickr, etc, get counted?

Additionally, I still think the UI for the stats is lacking. Something like Flickr's stats are much cleaner and simpler to navigate.

I do appreciate that these "new stats" are much better than the old ones. I appreciate the hard work that went into getting the stats this far.

Andy

Keep in mind that hits could come from viewers hitting your site from SmugMug - thus not causing any referrer link to show.

kygarden

My issue is not really the statistics, but the issue of others using my photos on shady web sites because of the sharing option. Is there no way to break the sharing for these shady web sites or is it all or nothing? Share and let any web site display your photo on their site, not matter what the site content is....or block sharing completely?

I think I'll just kill the sharing except for hidden/passworded galleries I use for forums and ebay, etc. It's a shame though, because I guess the facebook share link won't show up if you have the external links/easy sharing function turned off. What would be nice is for me (the owner) to be able to have a share button when I'm logged in for easy sharing on my part, but NO share button for visitors....except for maybe specific permissions to be able to share using the Facebook button.

Synapped

I have a lot of referrals from wiki1 and then some word spelled out following that, like wiki1 e-c-a-r-d.com. Some of them are adult sites. Is this related to what kygarden is talking about, that I just need to turn off the sharing to avoid this?

Andy

Synapped wrote: »

I have a lot of referrals from wiki1 and then some word spelled out following that, like wiki1 e-c-a-r-d.com. Some of them are adult sites. Is this related to what kygarden is talking about, that I just need to turn off the sharing to avoid this?

IF you turn off external links, they won't be able to link to your images.

Erick L

Andy wrote: »

IF you turn off external links, they won't be able to link to your images.

But it blocks everybody. It would be nice to blacklist some sites.

Andy

Erick L wrote: »

But it blocks everybody. It would be nice to blacklist some sites.

I think the problem is there are sooooo many of those types of sites, no? I really don't know the right answer, Erick

bohdank

There are a LOT of referrers that Smugmug could trap but, for some reason, isn't doing. I installed Statcounter which doesn't seem to have a problem filling in the referrers that Smugmug seems to miss, for some reason, such as Facebook, etc.

Fortuntaly it is free, to some degree, but it would be nice if I didn't have to go to 2 places to see where the hits are coming from.

PS: I am not related to Statcounter in any way other than a satisfied user.