New admin setting: only track visits on these domains / URLs hosts

[maze]

Piwik statistics can be distortet by copying the JavaScript code to third party sites. In the "Websites Management" you can add new sites with their URLs. But everybody can copy your JavaScript code to his own site and manipulate your statistics.

Piwik needs to be updated with a function that defines domains that are allowed to be counted.

[gre3d]

This option will only be viewable if you login as an admin? Other users that you just want checking stats should be given different login w/o admin credentials so they cannot go to site management.

View access will not show the javascript code shown to track within the Piwik front end.

[vipsoft]

Piwik relies on information sent by the browser. Whatever we do on the server, there is some implicit trust that what the client sends is not malicious.

Server side filtering might incur the performance penalty concern raised in ticket #9. Redesignating this ticket as a plugin feature request.

A benefit of the current implementation is that discrepancies in one's stats may help to identity copyvio or malicious activity to be blocked.

[vipsoft]

Requirements:

• UI to enter domain name(s) for this site, e.g., example.com, www.example.com, example.subhosting.com, subhosting.com/example/
• Filter out URLs which don't match domain names for this site
• Provide report of filtered URLs (group by domain) to identify potential copyvio or malicious activity

[matt]

There is now a mechanism that is used to cache site- data in files to be loaded by piwik.php tracker code. That wouldn't add the lookup at tracking time.

on the UI side we already ask for multiple URL alias for the website. we could simply add a checkbox (disabled by default): "Exclude all visits that do not load the Piwik code from one of these URLs".

I agree with vipsoft suggestion of reporting malicious activity, but not in V1.

[matt]

Correction: this should be in core, not in a plugin as I previously suggested.

[matt]

Also, the http referer should be checked and it should be non empty, and have one of the known domain URL.

[vipsoft]

The basic check is on the url parameter in the request.

The Referer check has to be separately enabled/disabled to accommodate use cases, such as:

• when the visited page is https, but the tracker is http (in which case, the Referer is empty)
• to mitigate undercounting visits when user agents block the Referer via add-on / privacy setting