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End referrer abuse in Radio

So you want to end referrer abuse, like l.m. orchard did in AmphetaDesk, but you use Radio? Well:

  1. Change aggregatorData.prefs.appSignatureUrl to the empty string. A Quick Script of aggregatorData.prefs.appSignatureUrl = "" will do it. This is actually all you must do to stop referrer abuse, but continue if you want to include your URL in the user-agent header like l.m. orchard did.
  2. Jump to xml.rss.readService. Find the wedge that begins if sizeof (referer) > 0. Move the lines new (tabletype, @headers) and adrheaders = @headers outside and before that wedge.
  3. Add a line headers.["User-Agent"] = "Radio UserLand/" + Frontier.version () + " (" + sys.os () + "; http://markpasc.org/ )" (with the appropriate URL in place of http://markpasc.org/) somewhere around there. Compile and close the script.

Because this is a change in Radio's system table, putting your URL in the user-agent string will disappear if UserLand distributes a new xml.rss.readService script--but your days of referrer abuse will be over and stay that way.

If you wonder why you should bother, here's the reason I just posted to Phil Ringnalda's post on the topic:

I ended up putting quite a few weblogs in one "RSS aggregator" ReferrerGroup in my webalizer.conf, because of this referrer poisoning. I can't tell if any of them really do link to me, because it'll only show up as an insignificant bump in my aggregator traffic.

Don't let this happen to you.
7:26 PM 31 Jan 2003 Permalink 2 comments

Rogers Cadenhead 8:33 PM 31 Jan 2003

Thanks for the tip. Instead of hard-coding the URL, you can call radio.weblog.getURL() to get your weblog's URL: headers.["User-Agent"] = "Radio UserLand/" + Frontier.version () + " (" + sys.os () + "; " + radio.weblog.getURL() + ")" I just tested this out and it put the following in my access log: xx.xx.xx.xx - - [31/Jan/2003:20:03:28 -0500] "GET /workbench/rss.xml HTTP/1.0" 200 10759 "-" "Radio UserLand/8.0.8 (WinNT; http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/)

Mark 10:44 PM 31 Jan 2003

Great! Thanks for the tip. Most people would want to do that, but you might not if you're doing a special thanks page like several folks have, or (like in my case) you want to link to some other page besides your weblog.