Wusage: Silly Name, Serious Stats!

Wusage 8.0 Manual

referringsites Option

To reach this option in the configuration file editor, follow these steps:

1. Edit Configuration
2. Configure Reports...
3. Top Referring Sites Report...
4. Chart Top Referring Sites

If you prefer to manually edit your configuration files, use the following syntax for this option:



Example

referringsites on
referringsites nopie
referringsites off

Description

This option is only useful if your server logs contain referrer information as an extra field, optionally in quotes, after the regular common log format fields, or if you have a separate referrer log. See the server notes section for information on configuring popular web servers to log this information in the best possible way. If you have a separate referrer log, use the -r command line option and the -l filename command line option when starting wusage. This produces a special summary report called referrers.html (note the spelling) in the report directory. It is best to configure your server to log the information in the main log file so it can be included in regular reports. If your log does not contain referrer data, this report will not contain useful information!

The referringsites report is a commonly requested variation on the Chart Top Referring URLs (referrers) report. The difference is that referringsites groups all incoming hits from the same site together, rather than keeping a separate count for each page on that site that links to the site being analyzed.

If present, the Chart Top Referring Sites (referringsites) option indicates that wusage should output information about the "referring" sites that linked to pages on your server. Note that browsers do not always report the referring site. If the Chart Top Referring Sites (referringsites) option is absent, or set to off, a referringsites report will not be generated. If it is set to nopie, the report is generated, but a pie chart is not drawn. This option is useful to determine what outside sites contain references to your site. You may receive unexpected results if your logs do not contain referrer information.

You will probably want to use the Ignored Referring URLs (ignorereferrers) option to ignore referring URLs that are within your own site. This ensures that outside links stand out in the referrers report.

See also How Many Referring URLs? (topreferrers), Chart Top Referring URLs (referrers), and Ignored Referring URLs (ignorereferrers).


Table of Contents
Topical Configuration Editor Reference
Alphabetical Configuration Editor Reference
Alphabetical Configuration File Reference
Glossary of Frequently Used Terms

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