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Reporting Blacklist

Introduction

Name

reporting-blacklist.cfg

Collection location

~/conf/collection/

Global Location

~/conf/

Description

The reporting blacklist can be used to prevent specified queries and IP addresses being included in Funnelback analytics reports.

Terms contained within the blacklist are compared as a case insensitive exact match against the query.

The blacklist only accepts complete single IP addresses (IP ranges and partial addresses are not supported).

This will include things like:

  • IP addresses of monitoring services
  • IP addresses of local/internal users (this is common to include if you wish to just see analytics based on external users to an organisation’s website)
  • Organisational banned words – terms that should be excluded from appearing in any analytics report.

Configuration

The reporting blacklist can be set at the server or collection level.

Collection level configuration

To access the Reporting Blacklist collection level configuration editor, go to administration home page then under the Administer tab select Browse Collection Configuration Files and it will open up the file manager. Then click on Edit Configuration Files button and it will navigate you to the configuration file manager. Alternatively you can use a WebDAV Client to edit this file directly.

Server level configuration

The server-wide reporting blacklist should be used to configure IP addresses and words that should be excluded from the analytics for all collections on the server.

Editing of the server-wide reporting blacklist files is currently only available via the backend at the following location: $SEARCH_HOME/conf/reporting-blacklist.cfg.

If a global $SEARCH_HOME/conf/reporting-blacklist.cfg exists its content is read and merged with the collection specific one when reports are updated.

Caveats

  • A full reports update is required when editing this file for the new blacklist to be effective on existing reports.

Format

The file contains one item per line. Each line is either:

  1. a query term that will not be counted in any reports

    The query term matching is a case-insensitive exact match. e.g. if the blacklist contains "bad query", then a log line with "bad query" will be excluded, but "bad" or "query" won't. Similarly if the blacklist has "query", a log line with "query" will be excluded but a log line with "bad query" won't.

  2. an IP address whose queries will not be counted in any reports

    Partial IP addresses are not supported.

  3. a comment. Comments may be placed in the file by using a '#' at the beginning of each line.

Example

# Some sites use javascript to clear their search form, but people misread the form and
# click the "search" button, ending up with "enter keywords" as a popular search term.
enter keywords
# ignore the spam query "viagra" from any IP address
viagra
# ignore any query from a known monitor service
@192.168.123.123

See also

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