Problem with referrers

Activating the blacklist will not remove old entries, only stop new ones from being recorded.

If new ones are still showing up, try downloading the Piwik database again and see if that resolves it.

Thanks. I was speaking about new entries. I tried to locate the Piwik database on my server. In which directory is it supposed to be?

It’s not on the file system, it’s stored in the database with the other WP Statistics’ options.

If you have access to phpMyAdmin (or a similar tool), you can run the following query to find the options value:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'wp_statistics';

And then take a look at the result, there should be a string like:

s:16:"referrerspamlist";

followed by a long list of referrer spam strings.

Hi Greg,
I ran the query and there is
s:12:”referrerspam”;s:2:”on”;s:19:”update_referrerspam”;b:0;s:21:”schedule_referrerspam”;s:2:”on”;
but no long list of referrer spam strings.
What to do?

Try downloading Piwik again (there is an option in Statistics->Settings->externals to do this).

If it still doesn’t work, check your PHP log for errors.

I just noticed the following warning:

ient(): unable to connect to https://browscap.org/version (Unable to find the socket transport “http” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?) in …/wp-content/plugins/wp-statistics/vendor/browscap/browscap-php/src/phpbrowscap/Browscap.php on line 1367

Warning: file_get_contents(): https:// wrapper is disabled in the server configuration by allow_url_fopen=0 in …/wp-content/plugins/wp-statistics/wps-updates.php on line 361

Warning: file_get_contents(https://raw.githubusercontent.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist/master/spammers.txt): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in …/wp-content/plugins/wp-statistics/wps-updates.php on line 361

That would do it, we need the https wrapper enabled to retrieve the browscap and Piwik files.

And how do I do that?

Some hosting providers disable them for security reasons, ask your hosting provider to find out more details.

Actually I’ve been able to do it on my own.
In my server settings “allow_url_fopen” was set to “off”
Now that I’ve changed it to “on” everything seems to work.
Thanks.

No problem.