Error with commas when adding user-agents to exclude

Resolved nem0
(@nem0)

6 months, 4 weeks ago

Hello,

our website is hit by Chinese bots coming from different IP addresses and the most efficient way to filter them from Matomo seems to be the two user agents that are always repeating. One of them reads Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Its a pretty outdated user-agent (Mac OS X) so we are confident it only filters the bots. But when I enter this user-agent string in WordPress in Matomo Analytics – Settings – Exclusions in the box labeled “Global list of user agents to exclude:” a weird thing happens. When I save and the page reloads, the user-agent strings is broken in two lines where the comma next to “KHTML,” is.

So instead of

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

I get (notice the missing comma after KHTML!)

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML
like Gecko) Chrome/139.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

So it seems to assume that the comma indicates a new line and removes it and enters a line break. I’m worried that this will filter now for user-agents containing either of the two lines and also will exclude legit users whose user-agent includes the string from the second line.

Is that a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft
(@dizzyatinnocraft)

6 months, 4 weeks ago

Hi @nem0, yes this is a bug. I’ll have a fix for you soon.

Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft
(@dizzyatinnocraft)

6 months, 4 weeks ago

@nem0 in the meantime, can you try using the free TrackingSpamPrevention plugin: https://plugins.matomo.org/TrackingSpamPrevention?wp=1 ? And see if this prevents the bot traffic you are seeing.

Thread Starter nem0
(@nem0)

6 months, 4 weeks ago

Already tried the TrackingSpamPrevention but it doesn’t help, the user-agents strings are normal Chrome user-agents and the IP addresses are always different so no good way to filter with that plugin.
Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft
(@dizzyatinnocraft)

6 months, 3 weeks ago
@nem0 Apologies, the solution required a bit more thought than previously thought. Can you please update the following files on your server:
1. /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/matomo/classes/WpMatomo/Admin/ExclusionSettings.php with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matomo-org/matomo-for-wordpress/65250c74e5229b83fda15d8fc3cc1a1f5305c7be/classes/WpMatomo/Admin/ExclusionSettings.php
2. /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/matomo/classes/WpMatomo/AjaxTracker.php with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matomo-org/matomo-for-wordpress/65250c74e5229b83fda15d8fc3cc1a1f5305c7be/classes/WpMatomo/AjaxTracker.php
3. /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/matomo/classes/WpMatomo/Settings.php with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matomo-org/matomo-for-wordpress/65250c74e5229b83fda15d8fc3cc1a1f5305c7be/classes/WpMatomo/Settings.php
4. /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/matomo/plugins/WordPress/WordPress.php with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matomo-org/matomo-for-wordpress/65250c74e5229b83fda15d8fc3cc1a1f5305c7be/plugins/WordPress/WordPress.php
then check that you can save the user agent with a comma, and that the user agent is excluded successfully?
Thread Starter nem0
(@nem0)

6 months, 2 weeks ago

@dizzyatinnocraft Yes, I updated the files and seems to work! Thanks!

Plugin Support dizzyatinnocraft
(@dizzyatinnocraft)

6 months, 2 weeks ago

Alright I’ll mark this as resolved.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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