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• Catalyst Open Source Academy

  16 janvier 2015, par Matthieu Aubry — Community

  The Open Source Academy is an initiative designed to provide training and work experience for young New Zealand technologists. Catalyst organises the Academy to show young technologists how to participate in open source communities and to fully explore their passion for IT through freely available open source tools.

  It has been running annually since 2011. We are proud that Piwik project could participate in the Academy again this year !

  What students got done

  It’s amazing what a few young students can get done in four days of participating in an open source project like Piwik ! They were able to quickly get started with Piwik, and continued to make useful contributions to the Piwik analytics platform.

  New Darkness theme

  Liam has created a new dark theme for Piwik called Darkness.

  

  To create the theme, Liam had to improve Piwik core stylesheets and created this pull request : Reuse the LESS variable for white color across all stylesheets.

  Accessibility improvements

  We were lucky to spend time with Julius, a Catalyst employee who is blind. He showed us in great detail how difficult and time consuming it can be for a blind user to use Piwik. For example we noticed how complicated it was for Julius to navigate the menus, to get to the main content, and to use the calendar and the Website selector. During this presentation we also noticed that Piwik was not yet usable with the keyboard.

  As a result of this session with Julius we got to work with the students to improve accessibility in Piwik.

  

  (photo source)

  List of accessibility improvements

  All these pull requests were created by the students and have been successfully merged into Piwik :

  • see the focus of menu items when tabbing through the page
  • Tweaks to improve accessibility (section around graph, better tooltip, set language in html)
  • Added h3 tags to widget headers
  • when main Menu is focused, display submenu
  • Add “Skip to content” feature when user presses tab key
  • Improved accessibility by putting offscreen text in the widget title

  To learn more about accessibility in Piwik check out this issue on our tracker.

  Summary

  Working with young students was fun and interesting. We were excited to see how much they got done in such a short time !

  At Piwik and Piwik PRO we are committed to building the best open analytics platform, and we will continue to support students who want to take part in the Piwik adventure.

  Be well,

• Stopping Referrer Spam

  13 mai 2015, par Piwik Core Team — Community

  In this blog post we explain what is Referrer spam, this new kind of spam that has recently appeared on the Internet. We also provide solutions to stop it and preserve the quality of your analytics data.

  What is Referrer Spam ?

  Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamming aimed at web analytics tools. A spammer bot makes repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.

  Here is an example of referrer spam in action :

  

  Half of those referrers are spams, here are some well know spammers that you may have seen in your logs : buttons-for-you-website.com, best-seo-offer.com, semalt.com…

  The benefit for spammers is that their website will appear in analytics tools like Piwik or Google Analytics :

  • public analytics reports (or logs) will be indexed by search engines : links to the spammer’s website will improve its ranking
  • curious webmasters are likely to visit their referrers, thus bringing traffic to the spammer’s website

  How to deal with Referrer Spam ?

  Referrer spam is still new and analytics tools are all handling it differently.

  Referrer Spam in Piwik

  At Piwik we started working on mitigating Referrer spam more than a year ago. If you use Piwik and keep it up to date, you do not need to do anything.

  Referrer spammers are automatically excluded from your reports to keep your data clean and useful.

  New spammers are continuously detected and added to Piwik’s blacklist on each update. If you find a new spammer in your analytics data, you can even report it so that it is added to the Piwik’s open referrer blacklist and blocked for everyone.

  Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

  Google Analytics doesn’t offer any spam protection by default. It can however be configured manually using a custom Filter.

  To create a filter in Google Analytics go to the Admin section and click on All Filters. Create a new custom filter that excludes based on the Campaign Source field. In the Filter pattern enter the spammers domains you want to exclude (this is a regular expression) :

  

  If new spammers arise you will need to update this list. You can also use Piwik’s referrer blacklist to exclude all the spammers currently detected.

  Other Analytics Tools

  Many web analytics tools do not yet handle Referrer spam and when using these tools, you will often find a lot of spam data in your Referrer Websites analytics reports.

  If you use an analytics tool that does not exclude Referrer spam, we recommend to contact the vendor and ask them to implement a mechanism to remove these referrer spammers. As of today many analytics vendors still have not mitigated this issue.

  Public List of Referrer Spammers

  At Piwik with the help of our large community we have decided to tackle this growing spam issue. We have created a list of up to date referrer spammers that anyone can edit.

  The list is available in a simple text file on Github : github.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist.

  The list is released under the Public Domain and anyone can use it within their applications to exclude referrer spammers.

  Many people have already contributed new spammers to the list. We invite you to use the list in your apps and websites and help us keep the list up to date !

  Let’s unite and fight the spammers together.

  Happy Analytics !

• Stopping Referrer Spam

  13 mai 2015, par Piwik Core Team — Community

  In this blog post we explain what is Referrer spam, this new kind of spam that has recently appeared on the Internet. We also provide solutions to stop it and preserve the quality of your analytics data.

  What is Referrer Spam ?

  Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamming aimed at web analytics tools. A spammer bot makes repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.

  Here is an example of referrer spam in action :

  

  Half of those referrers are spams, here are some well know spammers that you may have seen in your logs : buttons-for-you-website.com, best-seo-offer.com, semalt.com…

  The benefit for spammers is that their website will appear in analytics tools like Piwik or Google Analytics :

  • public analytics reports (or logs) will be indexed by search engines : links to the spammer’s website will improve its ranking
  • curious webmasters are likely to visit their referrers, thus bringing traffic to the spammer’s website

  How to deal with Referrer Spam ?

  Referrer spam is still new and analytics tools are all handling it differently.

  Referrer Spam in Piwik

  At Piwik we started working on mitigating Referrer spam more than a year ago. If you use Piwik and keep it up to date, you do not need to do anything.

  Referrer spammers are automatically excluded from your reports to keep your data clean and useful.

  New spammers are continuously detected and added to Piwik’s blacklist on each update. If you find a new spammer in your analytics data, you can even report it so that it is added to the Piwik’s open referrer blacklist and blocked for everyone.

  Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

  Google Analytics doesn’t offer any spam protection by default. It can however be configured manually using a custom Filter.

  To create a filter in Google Analytics go to the Admin section and click on All Filters. Create a new custom filter that excludes based on the Campaign Source field. In the Filter pattern enter the spammers domains you want to exclude (this is a regular expression) :

  

  If new spammers arise you will need to update this list. You can also use Piwik’s referrer blacklist to exclude all the spammers currently detected.

  Other Analytics Tools

  Many web analytics tools do not yet handle Referrer spam and when using these tools, you will often find a lot of spam data in your Referrer Websites analytics reports.

  If you use an analytics tool that does not exclude Referrer spam, we recommend to contact the vendor and ask them to implement a mechanism to remove these referrer spammers. As of today many analytics vendors still have not mitigated this issue.

  Public List of Referrer Spammers

  At Piwik with the help of our large community we have decided to tackle this growing spam issue. We have created a list of up to date referrer spammers that anyone can edit.

  The list is available in a simple text file on Github : github.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist.

  The list is released under the Public Domain and anyone can use it within their applications to exclude referrer spammers.

  Many people have already contributed new spammers to the list. We invite you to use the list in your apps and websites and help us keep the list up to date !

  Let’s unite and fight the spammers together.

  Happy Analytics !