Social-buttons. com - Who the h--- are they?

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AndrewH
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Social-buttons. com - Who the h--- are they?

Post by AndrewH »

Can anyone tell me who social-buttons.com are and what do they want? Recently, they have been all over my Google Analytics like a plague. Site visits from them outnumber all the others put together. They come from all over the globe - 35 countries and counting, and then from numerous different cities or states within each country. Always the bounce rate is 100% and the duration of visits is zero. They make darodar and statcounter look like minnows.

All I can tell from Whois is that they hide themselves behind a cloak company URL called 'Moniker'.

Any more information would be greatly appreciated.
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Post by Beachcondo »

No idea,
but they are a plague.

I tried to ban them from my analytics stats yesterday, I hope it works.
Pessimists only get positive surprises.
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Post by Beachcondo »

And now I found another one:
4webmasters. org

Same pattern and it's gone up as no1 nuisance since yesterday with 67 hits.

Back to the ban page again..... :evil:
Pessimists only get positive surprises.
AndrewH
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Social-Buttons

Post by AndrewH »

Beachcondo wrote:No idea, but they are a plague.
I tried to ban them from my analytics stats yesterday, I hope it works.
Since Social-Buttons came on the scene my page visits have started to go through the roof; all very nice but just a PITA when the bounce rates are 100% and the duration of visits is always zero. Now up to 38 countries; I had to look up where New Caledonia is on the world map.

What I want to ask you please, Beachcondo, or anyone, what is the way to ban them from my analytics?
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bornintheuk
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Re: Social-Buttons

Post by bornintheuk »

AndrewH wrote:
Beachcondo wrote:No idea, but they are a plague.
I tried to ban them from my analytics stats yesterday, I hope it works.
Since Social-Buttons came on the scene my page visits have started to go through the roof; all very nice but just a PITA when the bounce rates are 100% and the duration of visits is always zero. Now up to 38 countries; I had to look up where New Caledonia is on the world map.

What I want to ask you please, Beachcondo, or anyone, what is the way to ban them from my analytics?
You can use the filter method on your google analytics system to insure that they are not displayed.
If you want to stop them hitting your website and therefore swamping the server ten you will need to generate a ".htaccess" file - notice the "."
If you google htaccess then you should get some info on how to construct the text file, then upload it to your "public html" folder on your server.
If you PM me I can supply one I use for my website which denies from a lot of "rogue" sites such as "semalt", "buttons-for-websites" and the one in question.
What would Plato do ?
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greenbarn
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Post by greenbarn »

It's known as referrer spam and new sites crop up daily - google the expression for lots of information, but AIUI it's designed to make you click on the link which then generates traffic to their website. There was a bunch not long ago all pointing to some Russian shopping portal.

There was some useful information in this earlier thread about another site, daroder dot com:
viewtopic.php?t=23035&highlight=referrer
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Andrew, I've expanded on greenbarns .htaccess file and added it to your site.

It looks like this now. Just let me know if you have problems with any other sites.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer econom.co spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer iloveitaly.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer shopping.ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer social-buttons.com spambot=yes

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spambot
Last edited by kevsboredagain on Sun Mar 29, 2015 6:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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greenbarn
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Post by greenbarn »

kevsboredagain wrote:Andrew, I've expanded on greenbarns .htaccess file and added it to you site.

It looks like this now. Just let me know if you have problems with any other sites.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer econom.co spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer iloveitaly.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer shopping.ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer social-buttons.com spambot=yes

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spambot
Ooops - I had a typo in that file! iloveitaly.com should be ilovevitaly.com

Kev - my .htaccess file keeps growing with each new irritant - is there an issue with it becoming too big - or would it have to grow to an enormous size to have any detrimental impact?
For that matter - what impact does it have? Is it checked for every visitor to the site - I'm guessing that's the case?

Some of the more recent ones I've had to block are:
priceg.com
blackhatworth.com
hulfingtonpost.com
cenoval.ru
bestwebsitesawards.com
o-o-6-o-o.com
humanorightswatch.org

and so far I haven't had the subject of this particular thread!

Some of the names are getting sneakier and easier to believe, eg hulfingtonpost.com (rather than huffingtonpost) and I guess it's only because a handful of visits from one of these sites is enough to skew my stats that I pick up on them.

Edit - I realise I have been targeted by social-buttons as well; I've been experimenting with Wordfence - a security plugin for Wordpress - and blocked it there.

BTW, Wordfence gives you a very nice Live Traffic display with a useful breakdown - eg a visitor to my site from Chipping Norton arrived via XYZ site, then moved to my availability page etc etc. Beats Sunday afternoon television anyway.
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

greenbarn wrote:
kevsboredagain wrote:Andrew, I've expanded on greenbarns .htaccess file and added it to you site.

It looks like this now. Just let me know if you have problems with any other sites.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer econom.co spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer iloveitaly.com spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer shopping.ilovevitaly.ru spambot=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer social-buttons.com spambot=yes

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spambot
Ooops - I had a typo in that file! iloveitaly.com should be ilovevitaly.com

Kev - my .htaccess file keeps growing with each new irritant - is there an issue with it becoming too big - or would it have to grow to an enormous size to have any detrimental impact?
For that matter - what impact does it have? Is it checked for every visitor to the site - I'm guessing that's the case?

Some of the more recent ones I've had to block are:
priceg.com
blackhatworth.com
hulfingtonpost.com
cenoval.ru
bestwebsitesawards.com
o-o-6-o-o.com
humanorightswatch.org

and so far I haven't had the subject of this particular thread!

Some of the names are getting sneakier and easier to believe, eg hulfingtonpost.com (rather than huffingtonpost) and I guess it's only because a handful of visits from one of these sites is enough to skew my stats that I pick up on them.

Edit - I realise I have been targeted by social-buttons as well; I've been experimenting with Wordfence - a security plugin for Wordpress - and blocked it there.

BTW, Wordfence gives you a very nice Live Traffic display with a useful breakdown - eg a visitor to my site from Chipping Norton arrived via XYZ site, then moved to my availability page etc etc. Beats Sunday afternoon television anyway.
It will affect performance to some degree but all you have in this case is a list so nothing fancy in terms of processing. It may add a few 100 bytes to the load time of your site, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

BTW in the old thread I grabbed that list from, you had two variables defined, spambot and spammer. Both would do exactly the same and the variable name is not important. Therefore only one list is required.

I've seen htaccess files with 100s of lines, attempting to block all forms of software that can clone a site.
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Post by FelicityA »

Oh b****r, I have had 36 visits from them this month. New email to PMP support who will no doubt block them tomorrow.
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greenbarn
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Post by greenbarn »

Thanks for the extra info kev.
kevsboredagain wrote: BTW in the old thread I grabbed that list from, you had two variables defined, spambot and spammer. Both would do exactly the same and the variable name is not important. Therefore only one list is required.
Yes, at the time I was looking at different sources from Google but later learned that they did the same job - so that halved the size of the file! Initially it didn't seem to work unless I entered under both variables, but I think I was misled by not refreshing the cached file consistently. :roll:

FWIW for anyone using Wordpress, if you have the Yoast SEO plugin one of its tools is Edit Files which takes you straight to the robots.txt file and the .htaccess file, which saves having to work out where they're supposed to live. (Obviously not relevant for Kev and other gurus!)
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Post by AndrewH »

Thanks everyone for taking an interest in and answering my question. It's nice to know that there are techies on LMH, who have got all this covered.

Speaking as a non-techy, I have learnt that Social-Buttons is a 'spambot', intent on messing up ones site analytics in the hope that you will go to their site and buy something or perhaps get yourself a virus. So sneaky that they put another letter somewhere inside a well known name or phrase, so when you write the code excluding them, they hope you will slip up. Scumsbags!

Thanks very much, Kevin, for fixing that on my own site. I am glad that site visits on the graph are back to bobbing along within millimetres of the x-axis. I never thought I would hear myself saying that.
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