Referrer Spam Mass Murder

26 Jan 05

Referrer Spam Mass Murder

I stopped checking my referrer logs several months ago; the insane amounts of spam I was receiving had made it unpleasant and pointless.

Then, a week or so ago, I was fortunate enough to come across Caveat Lector's spam category posts, via Roger. After updating my .htaccess file with the rules suggested there, I have seen a 99% decrease in referrer spam. At least. This is an excellent one-stop resource.

Note that some of the suggested techniques require that the hosting provider has configured Apache to support the SetEnvIfNoCase directive in .htaccess files. If this is not the case with your host, you may wish to have a look at coldforged's Killing Referral Spam instead.

Filed under:

January 26, 2005, 9:17 pm

BlogAid
Help support the Asian earthquake and tsunami appeal...

Save Darfur
A preventable humanitarian crisis is raging in the Darfur region..

Ads by me

9 Comments (skip to form)

Roger Johansson

Comment on January 26, 2005 at 10:06 pm

Yeah it works pretty well. Unfortunately, new spammers keep popping up in the logs all the time. I'm up to 100 blocked URLs now, and I don't think it will stop there.
ColdForged

Comment on January 26, 2005 at 10:44 pm

Thanks for the nod!

Unfortunately, new spammers keep popping up in the logs all the time.

Agreed, though the vast majority are hawking similar things that can be caught with obvious words. This is also why I crafted my script to make it painless to add more words to the .htaccess list. If I can add a new word with two clicks I'll be more likely to keep the list up to date.

Good luck in your own killings .
seriocomic

Comment on January 26, 2005 at 11:12 pm

Thanks for the links Lars, although I'm not a prime target for the spammers due to not being indexed by Google, I have seen a slight increase in this activity.
Lars

Comment on January 26, 2005 at 11:36 pm

Roger, it probably won't stop anytime soon, but what can you do? I wonder how much it takes before the .htaccess rules start slowing down server performance though? I guess that's the only major concern I have right now.

ColdForged, thanks for sharing! Good point about making it easy to edit the .htaccess file. I definitely agree.

Mike, yeah that's certainly a positive side effect of your somewhat unusual policy. But what about comment spam?
seriocomic

Comment on January 27, 2005 at 12:50 pm

I haven't yet (touch wood) had one single instance of comment spam.
James

Comment on January 27, 2005 at 7:59 pm

I'll be using this on my partner's site which recently got drenched in spam comments. On my own I'm frankly glad for the attention, spam is always (momentarily) welcome.
Lars

Comment on January 27, 2005 at 8:02 pm

Mike, I'll be damned. How is that possible?

James, you can't be serious.
seriocomic

Comment on January 27, 2005 at 9:56 pm

Lars,

Dunno, I can only put it down to the not-indexed thing. It's the only difference to several other blogs I host.

(waits for another spam karma boot)
Lars

Comment on January 28, 2005 at 12:50 pm

It's still remarkable though.

I hope you appreciate the time it saves you!

(spam karma has now been deactivated)

Comment Information and Guidelines

Please note: Comment moderation is currently enabled so there may be a delay between when you post your comment and when it shows up. Patience is a virtue; there is no need to resubmit your comment.
TrackBack URI for this post:
https://larsholst.info/blog/2005/01/26/referrer-spam-mass-murder/trackback/
HTML allowed (please close tags):
HTML is optional, but if you do use it, please make sure that: markup is well-formed and valid XHTML 1.1 ampersands (&) are encoded as & angle brackets (< and >) are encoded as < and > Offensive, distasteful, and irrelevant comments will be deleted.

mono

26 Jan 05