Tag: referral spam

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/

Analytics Spam Blocker 3.2 – 10 more domains blocked!

The first update of the year, adding 10 more domains to the default block list. These domains have been reported by users over the past year. Additionally, Analytics Spam Blocker of-course works on WordPress 6.5.2.

Along with the new domains a few typos in the dashboard have been corrected as well as reorganizing the dashboard blocks into a more logical order.

Are you reporting spam domains?

Since Analytics Spam Blocker 3 reporting domains is easier than ever, the domains you report get added to your own blocklist immediately. If a few people report the same domain it’ll be included in the standard blocklist in a future update. Reporting referral spam is an important measure to keep your Analytics such as Google Analytics or Matomo Analytics relevant and neat.

To get rid of referral spam the best way is to make it obsolete. This is of-course easily done with Analytics Spam Blocker. As always, stay vigilant and report referral spam domains through the form in your dashboard. When several people report the same domain it’ll be included in the blocklist in the next update.

When enough domains get reported, and consistently so, hopefully one day the internet will be free of referral spam. Only with your help we can make this happen – so keep reporting your referral spam domains via the Analytics Spam Blocker dashboard in the Tools menu.

Changes for Analytics Spam Blocker version 3.2

Added 10 more domains to the default blocklist based on user reports
Fixed Dashboard typos
Updated API requests

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/

Analytics Spam Blocker 2.6 – New API, Better API!

Welcome to an all new API for Analytics Spam Blocker. Now with faster response times, better handling of requests and you get some insights in the API’s Analytics, too.

Blocklists are updated daily, as before. The reporting routine has been updated and modernised a bit to work better.

Analytics Spam Blocker has been tested to work on the new and fancy WordPress 5.0. If you find any weirdness or bugs, let me know. Thanks!

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.