February 11, 2004

Referrer Spam

This morning's little project was editing my htaccess file to try to block a little referrer spammage. I know I've been hit by folks scraping the content off my site (hello IAEA!) and by bots (hello bloogz!), but I never bothered before, partly because it didn't seem like such a big deal, mostly because I'm lazy. But for the past week or so the darn referrer list has been filled with a ton of spam urls, all coming from shawcable.net, and it's ticking me off.

I use the Textism Refer utility as a quick reminder of who's visiting me, so I can visit them. I'm tired of having to weed through a bazillion url's about janet's boobs, paris hilton, free teen lesbian sex, free milf pics, casino gambling and drugs in order to see if Geekman is still alive and visiting. If I want any of that stuff, I'll just go to his site!

So, armed with this handy-dandy tip from weblog wannabe and a nifty tutorial on htaccess, I made my feeble attempt denying at access to them. I also turned on hotlink protection for the first time. Soon I will block search engines and all traffic from bots. Then, I'll make this a password-protected site, and I shall have my own little quiet piece of the Internet where nobody can find me.

UPDATE: Another simply elegant solution comes from By Sand and Sea. Change the default page location for the referrer log! Duh. Thanks Brian!

Comments

But . . . but . . . what about . . . BASEBALL!?!? Can't block us! No! No! No!

Posted by: Scott at February 11, 2004 07:54 AM

I've been getting the same thing from shawcable.net too. It's close to making me restrict access to my referrers. I've been using that same tip from weblog wannabe ... it has cut down but I'm still getting some hits. I've already blocked Google and other search engines from my blog (other reasons). Will those grade school spamming bullies ever grow up? I doubt it.

Posted by: Becky at February 11, 2004 10:35 AM

Go read Raye's post about this exact problem and her very easy solution.

Posted by: Brian at February 11, 2004 01:27 PM

I actually banned anyone coming from .no.shawcable.net, in addition to killing certain keywords. Why use a scalpel when a chainsaw will do? :)

Posted by: Solonor at February 11, 2004 02:15 PM

As my me-appointed technical advisor, is this something I should do?

Posted by: Busy Mom at February 11, 2004 05:18 PM

Thanks for the tip Sol, and I hope all of us can see a bit more accuracy in our referrer logs.

Posted by: Ryan at February 11, 2004 07:43 PM

You know that Textism's referrer script has an option in it for filtering out keywords as well, yes? I've been plugging them in for awhile now myself. The problem wasn't so bad until just the last few weeks where it's gone nutz.

Posted by: Les at February 17, 2004 04:41 PM

Yeah, I've been plugging in those too. Even the above tips only kept the list relatively clean for a couple of days. Damn spammers!

Posted by: Solonor at February 17, 2004 04:58 PM

If you don't see a way to enter a comment, it's not because I don't love you. It's because they have been set to auto-close after 5 days.

Thank you, comment spammers. Thank you to hell.

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