Mint Forum

by accident, i discover that mint refuses to track pages (most notably with secret crushes and referrers pepper, and may be main mint as well) that contain codes in the title, such as &-#-8-2-1-7-;-s (i hyphenated the code for clarity), that are used to denote contractions or punctuations like apostrophes and quotation marks. because my site has many many pages that includes these codes used in the title, Mint is giving me stats that are much lower than the stats from awstats using the sever log.

can someone verify this?

ok, shaun, i am trying this out…

if this is the cause, which of the stats will be under-reported? everything (including the # of unique IP and total visits)? or is it just secret crush and referrers peppers that are affected?

lastly, since i have been using Mint since 1.0+ and now just discovered this issue, are you implying that all my stats are incorrect (for everything i collected with v1 and v2.0, v2.1)?

if this is the cause, which of the stats will be under-reported?

It’s not a question of under-reported, if mod_security prevents the server from responding to a request then nothing can be recorded for those urls.

can you explain why these HTML codes are considered security risk?

I can’t. I don’t think they are a security issue as much as they are a potential flag for comment and referrer spam (neither of which would affect Mint). I’ve tried contacting the maintainers of mod_security to get to the root of the issue but I received no reply.

Because this is a mod_security issue it applies to all versions of Mint.