Jimmy Legs

thanks folks! i'll give this a shot. what sucks is having to add such specific info to exclude stuff. seems like there should be some way of differentiating referrals that are valid form the spam, but i guess nobody ever thought this would become such a target.

the longer i keep my site, the more i am seeing spam referrals in awstats (sites show up in referral list that never actually linked to my site). isn't there something i can add to my .htaccess file to keep this from happening?

it was about 15MB. it may well have been the receiving server's limits then, cuz the email (using Eudora, not web-based mail) said it went through but as soon as the whole thing processed, it returned the error saying something like "server refused; message too large". so the trouble is probably on the other side.

i was just trying to email a fairly large file and the server returned an error saying it was too big. what is the maximum file size that can be emailed and can this be changed at all?

where is the file that you're trying to change? i was tyring to set my stats config file to 444, but apparently the new cpanel doesn't allow it. but all the files in my html folders seem to be retaining their proper permissions. also, what are you using to set permissions? ie, i use ws_ftp.

i do know netfactual goes through sites for some kind of data gathering service. and i suspect sites like hostitcheap purposefully set things up so people will see them in the referrer log, visit the site and presumably be so impressed with their hosting plans they sign up immediately. an interesting marketing plan, if not a very effective one.

cool, i have submitted a ticket. something i just noticed, even tho i set the permissions to 444, when i log back in, i find the file has already reset to 644. so that's why it's getting overwritten. i hope somebody can figure this out!

i've had TCH for many months now and i can't believe how lucky i am to have stumbled across them. well not stumbled, i spent a lot of time researching hosts, but here are so many who promise so many things, i consider myself pretty lucky to have decided on TCH. my other friends have had nothing but horror stories about their hosts: poor support, overly expensive, outright cheating of the customer. meanwhile my experience with TCH has been only good, and it keeps getting better. every obstacle i've had has been met with quality advice. i've said it before, but the existence of these forums on TCH are perfect illustrations of why they rock. anybody can come along here and post questions or read what people who have already bought hosting have to say. TCH is basically saying, 'we have nothing to hide.' most other hosts won't even give you the time of day.

hey folks i customize my awstats .conf file to get specific funtionality (DNS lookup, host skipping, etc). we had a big discussion some months back about how the server would overwrite this configuration file every day. Rick finally figured out that if you set permissions at 444, the server is unable to overwrite. this has worked for me for a long time, but in the past few days i've noticed the file is getting reset even with the permissions restricted to read-only. does anyone know how to get around this?

i'll just jump in here with this: i think all the blog software out there is great, it's allowing tons of people to easily build sites. what's a drag is visiting several blogs and finding they all look exactly alike. but i guess that's the downside of getting the content online. my own blog runs off that old guestbook script that everybody used to use, the kind available from Matt's Script Archive. it's not exactly the most robust system, but it was a fun exercise in messing with CGI code, something i know nothing about. i'm hoping to write my own blog script in PHP one of these days. i've seen a few indie blogs out there, but not as many as i would expect. does anybody know any offhand?

yeah that's what i did, just delete the forum directory, then delete the db in mysql.

i wouldn't worry about deleting everything to start over. as long as you installed your forum into its own folder, you can just delete this whole thing. then in Manage Mysql you can delete the sql database that was created by the bulletin board. start over and install a new board. make sure you wait before trying to access the board itself, so the database can be created, etc. the first time i did it i tried immediately going to the board and i got the whole install page, which was confusing. a minute later, i tried it again and the board popped right up, ready to go. and that "XMB" thing is just partof your database's name, it goes with the phpbb. hope that helps!

i can't say i've seen any stats app parse the info by state, but there may be some package out there that does. but considering how difficult it often is to even determine the general location of an ip address, i'm not sure it would work with any accuracy. i usually can determine the local of a difficult address by running a traceroute and looking at the steps along the way, but even that isn't definitive.

go to the "Manage Accounts" thing under FTP on the control panel. it gives you FTP addresses to get your log files. i assum if you just copy the URL into your stats program it will work. i should probably try this myself. what stats app are you using?

you may have to edit your config file to use DNSlookup. otherwise some IPs just can't be resolved easily. see the previous thread in this section about Awstats skiphosts for info about editing the file.

i don't seem to have this problem, i just tried changing permissions and it worked. what are you using to CHMOD? i'm just using ws_ftp.

yes, kudos to Rick for figuring this one out! my stats are remaining constant at long last. i gotta admit, one of the main reasons i chose TCH was because of these discussion boards. and here is the proof!

i'm hoping somebody will figure out how to keep the config files from getting reset to the defaults. i can't imagine this is something that can't be helped. for now, i'm doing the same thing, uploading the .conf file every day. not hard, but all this duplication of effort seems rather counter-intuitive. can you tell i'm at work right now?

sometimes sending mail can be difficult if you are using 'mail.******'. if this is a problem try changing the send mail server to your ISP's mail server. that seemed to help me as well. i also had a lot of trouble with eudora which seemed to stem from trying to use authenication. so i just turned it off and now it works.

thanks Lianna, for checking this stuff out. meanwhile, dsdemmin, have you manually reloaded the stats page after you uploaded the edited config file? also be aware of this weird thing that seems to be resetting the config file to its default state every day. stats are fun to obsess over but of debatable usefulness. still, if i don't obsess over my stats, who will?

this is odd ... this morning my awstats config file updated itself (i guess) and all the settings reverted to their defaults. what's up with that?

thanks for the pointers! i edited the file to rule out my ip, enabled the DNSlookup, and added that "update now" link on it. much better!

yeah, it says i need to edit the skiphosts parameter. but i don't know how to get to the config file. oh, and i see the links to server logs under the FTP section of cpanel, so i got that covered at least

is there a way to set options for AWstats, such as editing the skiphosts file to exclude my IP address? also is there a way to get the access log directly, not as an archive?

i was looking through google's usenet archive and found a couple of people saying that the -w switch may help with compatibility issues. i know my code is ancient, so newer versions of Perl may have trouble with it.