NP_Referrer is a plugin for Nucleus which allows you track referring websites and webpages. The resulting data can be used to print a list of the top referrers on each page, or a list of recent referrers. This plugin has build in anti-spam measures and can additionally use the NP_Blacklist plugin. Manage your plugins using the administration interface and block unwanted plugins.

1. Unzip the file and upload the contents to your plugin directory
2. Install the plugin...

Before a referrer is accepted by this plugin it is checked in several ways. This is necessary because it is currently quite popular to spam websites using referrers. This plugin will try to prevent these spamming attempts by not displaying suspicious referrers by default. These referrers are blocked and can be manually checked to see if they are spam or not. The plugin will use the following criteria to determine if a referrer is suspicious:

• If the plugin cannot retrieve the referring URL.
• The title of the referring page is checked for certain keywords, such as poker, viagra, etc..
• Whether or not the referring page contains a link back to your website.
• If the NP_Blacklist plugin is installed, it will use this plugin to check if the referrer is a known spammer present in the MT Blacklist, if the IP address of the spammer is an open proxy known in the Distributed Sender Blackhole List, or if the referrer is a spammer known in the SPAM URI Realtime Blocklist.

To view all blocked referrers go to the Blocked referrers page. If the plugin could not retrieve the referring URL, the Checked? column will have the value No. Click the icon to retry retrieving the referring URL. If the plugin suspects that the referrer is spam it will mark it as such, including a spam score in the Spam? column. If the referring URL has a link back to your site it will mark it as such in the Link? column.

If you want to collect statistics about referrers for a particular page you must place the following variable in the skin of that particular page. For example, if you place the variable in the Item Pages skin, the plugin will collect the referrers for all item pages.

• <%Referrer%>
  Collect referrer statistics, but do not show a list.

If you want to collect referrer statistics and at the same time show a list of referrers, there are two main keyswords you can use: last and top, which will determine what information is shown. The last parameter is always the number of items to be shown:

• <%Referrer(last,10)%>
  Shows the last 10 referrers to the current page.
• <%Referrer(top,15)%>
  Shows the top 15 referrers to the current page.

By default, the plugin will only show statistics for the current page, but you can also show statistics for the whole website by simply adding a new parameter to the skin variable. Add the global keyword to count the whole website:

• <%Referrer(last,global,25)%>
  Shows the last 25 referrers to the whole site.
• <%Referrer(top,global,5)%>
  Shows the top 5 referrers to the whole site.

You can also use nosearch and search to exclude search engines or limit your request to search engines only:

• <%Referrer(top,nosearch,15)%>
  Exclude search engines from the top 15 of this page.
• <%Referrer(top,search,15)%>
  Top 15 search engines only of this page.
• <%Referrer(top,search,global,5)%>
  Shows the top 5 search engines of the whole site.
• <%Referrer(top,global,search,5)%>
  Shows the top 5 search engines of the whole site.

• [Version 1.0.1, 2005-06-06]
  • Security bugfix: Admin area is exposed to all members, not just admins. Users of this plugin are recommended to upgrade to 1.0.1.
• [Version 1.0, 2005-03-07]
  • First public release of Trackback 1.0

For a complete changelog of all versions of the Referrer plugin, including versions older than 1.0 and the Referer2 plugin see the CHANGELOG.txt file included with the plugin package.