Home | About Chris Hope | Contact Chris Hope | Search:

Apache logs and fbc_channel=1 and odd referrer URLs

Posted April 7th, 2010 (Updated June 7th, 2010)

I've noticed that while daily visitor numbers to this blog have been much lower than usual (presumably due to the Easter holiday period) my pageviews have increased significantly over the past couple of days so that my visitors are viewing around 2.17 pageviews per visit instead of around 1.25. A sudden increase like this makes me suspicious so I started checking my log files and found something that is probably unrelated but am wondering if anyone knows what these requests are all about.

Solution to the issue

Thanks to "bobgrigoryan" I was able to work out a solution using the Facebook Developer documentation. The issue is due to cross domain communication and I have posted the solution here: Facebook Connect and Disqus Comments.

 

Original post continues below...

 

Update about 45 minutes after posting

Right, so the issue discussed below appears to be caused by the Facebook Connect login function which I have enabled in the Disqus comments that appear at the end of each post. Thanks to Bob Brown for his advice to have poke around with Firebug.

It seems that if you log out of Disqus in the comments are it fires off a similar request to the ones detailed below, and if you login using FB Connect then it sends these requests too and quite possibly at other times as well.

And of course, when I log into the Disqus admin panel and check my settings, there's the API key which you are seeing in the log files listed below... Shame I didn't think to look at Disqus and Firebug before writing this post.

As a result I have decided to disable the additional login functions including Facebook Connect. It will be interesting to see how to affects my stats.

 

Original post continues below.

 

Facebook referrers and fbc_channel=1

I'm seeing a lot of activity in my log files like this:

193.194.156.5 - - [01/Apr/2010:00:00:02 +1300] "GET /php-curl-cookies/?fbc_channel=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 4978 "http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=2&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Fphp-curl-cookies%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
74.51.149.4 - - [01/Apr/2010:00:01:15 +1300] "GET /maximum-length-mysql-text-field-types/?fbc_channel=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 4967 "http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=0&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Fmaximum-length-mysql-text-field-types%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
124.247.200.80 - - [01/Apr/2010:00:01:33 +1300] "GET /mysql-show-indexes-table/?fbc_channel=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 5205 "http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=0&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Fmysql-show-indexes-table%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20060911 SUSE/2.0.0.2-2.13 Firefox/2.0.0.2"
95.117.117.122 - - [01/Apr/2010:00:01:54 +1300] "GET /jquery-add-remove-check-css-class/?fbc_channel=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 4919 "http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=0&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Fjquery-add-remove-check-css-class%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.0.16) Gecko/2009121601 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.16"
66.31.158.84 - - [01/Apr/2010:00:04:20 +1300] "GET /article/networking/pop3-commands/?fbc_channel=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 6271 "http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=0&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Farticle%2Fnetworking%2Fpop3-commands%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

I checked last month's log files and these requests are nothing new but what's the referrer string all about with the login_status.php URL and the api_key etc?

http://www.facebook.com/extern/login_status.php?api_key=be1f22f8362a10576891f6e052db81ed&extern=0&channel=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electrictoolbox.com%2Farticle%2Fnetworking%2Fpop3-commands%2F%3Ffbc_channel%3D1&public_session_data=1&locale=en_US

If I go to the above page, and I've checked it in both Firefox and Chrome, I get a blank page but it's doing some Javascript crap in the background which actually requests files off the server including logging pageviews etc, and triggering pageviews in Google Analytics, Buy Sell Ads and so on.

The HTML from the above page looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Login Status</title>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.domain = "facebook.com";
</script><script src="http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/connect.php/en_US" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
FB.Bootstrap._requireFeatures(["Connect"], function() {
FB.XdComm.Server.init("/xd_receiver_v0.4.php");
var loginStatus = new FBIntern.LoginStatus();
loginStatus.initialize(
/* channel */ "http:\/\/www.electrictoolbox.com\/article\/networking\/pop3-commands\/?fbc_channel=1",
/* session info */ null,
/* settings */ {"inFacebook":true,"locale":"en_US"},
/* connect state */ 2,
/* base_domain */ "www.electrictoolbox.com",
/* public_session_data */ null,
/* parent_window_url */ "",
/* origin */ "",
/* perms */ null);
});
</script></body></html>

What's this all about? Is this something I should be worried about or does it not matter? In the almost 4 days so far this month these requests account for approximately 20% of my pageviews, so if people aren't actually seeing anything it's seriously skewing my stats up.

If anyone knows, please send me an email or leave a comment below.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus