Weird HTTP referer problem
September 11, 2007 – 6:08 pmFor the past few months I’ve been developing my own version of Google Analytics. Don’t take that the wrong way, I absolutely love Google Analytics and I think that anyone who isn’t taking advantage of it is missing out big time. However, there are data that Google simply can’t afford to collect and process for the millions of websites and billions of pageviews that they record every day. At least not without being paid for the service. And since they give away their service for free I’m not going to complain. I just took matters into my own hands.
But that is a post for a different day. The real reason for this post is that at some point today, between 1:03 and 1:06 PM (GMT -6) according to my website tracking system, anyone that shows up with an empty referer doesn’t actually show an empty referer anymore. Instead they show this:
http://esc04.midphase.com:2086/scripts2/getthemes?modules=1
At 1:03:17 I saw a blank referer, which is pretty normal since many people now use Firefox and it’s just a couple of clicks to turn off the referer and give yourself a false sense of privacy. That and anyone that types or pastes an address into their browser rather than clicking a link won’t show a referer. Then at 1:06:22 I saw the first occurrence of the mystery referer.
That URL goes to a Web Host Manager page that allows you to choose which plugins will be installed for cPanel users on your server. My first reaction was that someone at my hosting company was looking at one of my websites and somehow sent that URL as their referer. Then I noticed that there were hundreds of these referers to many of my websites.
I’m fairly certain that the problem lies with my server configuration. It’s unlikely that something has gone wrong with my tracking script since it’s been working just fine for a few months now. It has also been installed on over 200 domain names and I would have had to change it across all of them at once in order to see the problem across my entire portfolio.
I’ve submitted a support ticket with the facts I have and I am patiently awaiting a response from the Ukrainians that Midphase has outsourced their support department to.
EDIT: Just got a response from support.
Sorry, I cannot say what could be wrong.
Is there some way for me to replicate this issue?
So I whipped up two example pages that linked to each other and displayed the issue in a visual way that even a moron could understand.
EDIT II: Tech support just restarted Apache and that seems to have cleared up the issue.
