Feature to delete historical referral spam #8404
Labels
Enhancement
For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc.
not-in-changelog
For issues or pull requests that should not be included in our release changelog on matomo.org.
trackingspam
For issues related to receiving tracking requests from spammers and bots.
Milestone
It's great that Piwik now keeps an up to date list of referral spammers, but this doesn't seem to affect any stats in the past?
It would be great if there were a feature to delete all historical data from referral spam bots. This could either be triggered automatically, or maybe with a button in the web interface or command on the server.
I only recently just upgraded my Piwik installation, so most of my stats are still clogged up with referral spam.
There's also the fact that even with the new auto-updating spammer list, there will always be a gap between the time spammers are discovered, added to the list, and then received in the Piwik installation. So if we had a feature that deleted historical spam, that would fix up that gap too going forward, giving everyone an "eventually pure" spam free database.
Another bonus advantage is reducing the size of the database. 99.99% of us don't want this data at all, and for small websites it can easily account for 50% to 99% of your stats.
Maybe a very small number of people want referral spam kept, so for those who do, it could be made optional. Although I think auto-deleting junk data would be a sensible default.
If somebody is able to implement this and it's going to be a manually triggered thing, it would be great if it can be applied to all websites in the Piwik installation in one go.
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