This page last changed on Dec 17, 2009 by ggaskell.

An external referrer is any site that links to your Confluence instance. Each time someone clicks on the external link, your Confluence site can record the click as a referral.

You can exclude external referrers to prevent them from being recorded or displayed anywhere on your site. Once you have specified your list of blocked URLs, any incoming links from URLs that match the list will no longer be recorded. Referrer URLs are blocked if they start with any of the URLs in the exclusion list. So http://evilspamsite.blogspot.com will also match http://evilspamsite.blogspot.com/nastypage.html

There are two instances where you may want to do this:

  1. If you are running a Confluence installation that is open to public:
    In a site that is open to public, one unfortunate problem is that malicious sites can spam the display of a page's incoming links statistics. This is usually done to get the site's URL to appear in the sidebar. By adding these sites to the 'excluded referrers' list, you can prevent them from being listed on your site.
  2. If Confluence is installed on a server with multiple domain names or IP addresses:
    Confluence will consider any URL originating from the domain name where Confluence is installed as an internal link. However, if Confluence is installed on a server with multiple domain names or IP addresses, you will need to add the other domain name prefixes to this list to let Confluence know that any links from these domains should not be considered external links.

You need to be a Confluence administrator and to know the URL of the site to add it to the excluded referrers list.

To add a URL to the excluded referrers list,

  1. Go to the Confluence 'Administration Console'. To do this:

    • Open the 'Browse' menu and select 'Confluence Admin'. The 'Administrator Access' login screen will be displayed.
    • Enter your password and click 'Confirm'. You will be temporarily logged into a secure session to access the 'Administration Console'.
  2. Select 'Manage Referrers' in the left-hand panel.
  3. Add the URL to the 'Excluded External Referrer Prefixes' section.
    • You must include 'http://' at the front of the URL.
    • You can add more than one URL by putting each URL on a new line.


Screenshot: Excluding external referrers



RELATED TOPICS
Page: Excluding external referrers
Page: Adding SSL for Secure Logins and Page Security
Page: Hiding external referrers
Page: Managing External Referrers
Page: Ignoring External Referrers
Page: Hiding the People Directory
Page: Configuring Captcha for Spam Prevention
Page: Configuring the Administrator Contact Page
Page: Enabling or Disabling Public Signup
Page: Hiding External Links From Search Engines
Page: Configuring Captcha for Failed Logins
Page: User Email Visibility
Page: Anonymous Access to Remote API


Referrers.png (image/png)
ExcludeReferrers.png (image/png)
Document generated by Confluence on Jul 09, 2010 01:08