Tag: antispam

Analytics Spam Blocker 4.0 – Thousands more domains blocked!

Over the last few weeks and days I have re-done most of the plugin to make getting more domains to block more easily. As a whole the whole reporting system didn’t really work and the plugin never really took off like I hoped. So I devised a new system for referral spam protection.

Instead of dealing with 10-20 reports per year I’ve closed the whole reporting system effective immediately. Instead Analytics Spam Blocker will rely on publicly available blocklists and use those.

As an extra you can create your custom list and add more domains to that. The dashboard has been updated to reflect these changes. The blocklist is updated weekly through a background task. Currently the list holds about 2280 domains, which is already way way more than Analytics Spam Blocker had to begin with. This makes the plugin much more hands-off but also more effective for everyone.

Changes for Analytics Spam Blocker version 4.0

[new] Referral spam list from Matomo
[new] Weekly update referrel spam list from Matomo
[new] Check if domain already is blocked
[change] Code cleanup
[removed] Spamblocker API reporting

The download for Analytics Spam Blocker should pop up in your dashboard shortly. Or you can download the plugin here: https://ajdg.solutions/product/analytics-spam-blocker-for-wordpress/

No-Bot Registration 2.0 available now!

No-Bot Registration 2.0 brings a number of updates and tweaks to the dashboard to make it easier to read. Similar to version 1.9 last year. Also, and more importantly, included is an all new feature to blacklist certain usernames. And a bunch of checkmarks to impose rules to restrict what those usernames and email addresses can be. No short names, or not too many periods in email addresses for example.

A small security flaw has been patched where the plugin didn’t properly check if submitted settings were coming from you. Someone with privileged access and a custom made script could submit blacklist words without proper checks.

Compatible with ClassicPress

No-Bot Registration, like most of my plugins, is fully compatible with ClassicPress. ClassicPress is an excellent alternative for WordPress, especially if you do not like the Gutenberg block editor or the general direction WordPress as a platform is headed in. This website uses ClassicPress and has done so since 2021. It looks and feels like WordPress and can even use most of its plugins and themes.

Learn more about ClassicPress here. Or if you need advise or help with migrating your website to ClassicPress get in touch via the Contact form or buy the ClassicPress migration service.

Changes for No-Bot Registration 2.0

Added username blacklist
Added username and email restrictions
Added nonce protections to settings forms
Added basic config check
Code cleanup

The download for No-Bot Registration should show up in your dashboard. Or you can download the plugin here: https://ajdg.solutions/product/no-bot-registration/.

Analytics Spam Blocker 2.4.1 – Available now!

A update re-doing the dashboard a bit. Some tweaks to the internals and a few bug fixes for the dashboard. Let me know what you think about the new dashboard.

On the reports server a few tweaks have been made so that reported domains are included a bit quicker into the blocklist. Less reports are now needed to have the domain included.

Changes for 2.4.1

[new] Added help tabs
[fix] Some dashboard notifications not showing up correctly
[fix] Removed double html and css classes for errors
[change] Improved compatibility with WordPress
[change] Api updates
[change] Re-arranged the dashboard

Recently I’ve rewritten en re-released the fairly popular Analytics Spam Blocker. Originally created by Luke Williamson. He didn’t want to continue the project so I asked if I could take over and he agreed :)

Not being updated for a while there was a bunch of stuff to do, I’ve optimised the plugin a bit and rewritten a bunch of stuff to make it work with more modern WordPress versions – Though Lukes code was nice and not much needed to be done there.

More importantly. With the spawning of new bots and referral spam every day, a common complaint was that new domains to block weren’t included in the plugin fast enough. With my new version this is mostly negated by an automatic reporting system.