Having an issue with referers

Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 4:16 pm

Greets:

I'm trying to understand this and am looking for some help. I keep getting reports of referer blocks from my install of Sentinel. It keeps blocking on 'xxxx:' but I never see that in the agent. Here's a report:

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; Media Center PC 2.8; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Query String: [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

I get these a lot. Any ideas? From a quick search of the forums here, I get a few hits but they're for:

xxxx:++++++++++++++ (etc.)

thanks,
-drmike

Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 10:06 pm

Referer and User Agent are completely different. Referers of xxxx: are those used by Anonymizers to prevent you from knowing where your visitors come from.

Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 7:09 pm

Oh, OK. That I understand.

Would a proxy at a business give out a refer like that? I wonder as I get a large number of visitors from work and government addresses.

thanks,
-drmike

Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 8:54 am

It depends on how the company has their proxies setup up but yes it is possible.

You don't want these visitors blocked then you will need to goto the "Referer Blocker" config page and remove xxxx: from the textbox that listed referers to be blocked.

Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 8:19 am

Thanks. I was just trying to understand the logic behind why that was in there. I've gone ahead and removed it. For some reason, I get a lot of visits from what appears to be *.gov addresses. *shrug*

-drmike

New Member Joined: Mar 05, 2005 Posts: 20

is there a wild card way to block refers? like *xxx* will block all sites with that name in the url? i seem to be getting hammered by adult sites.

Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 9:38 pm

what is the common part of these urls? I never really tried to code it so you could global referers because they have never approved the .xxx extension to force all adult sites to Sad

Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 12:43 am

hey bob, okay i seem to get many variations of shemales.whatever.info or tranny.whatever.net but as you know they just redirect you to the main site. i was just wondering if i could *wildcard* "shemales" or whatever crap is spammed to my last referers block.