Referrer (or referer) spam has become a serious problem in the blogosphere. We need an intelligent way to eliminate this growing nuisance. I’ve thought about and researched this for the past few days, and below I offer a proposal for a technological solution to this problem. It requires programming, and I am not a programmer, so I welcome suggestions, corrections, and improvements to this proposal.
I hope that this blog entry can serve as something of a starting point for information about referrer spam as well as a sandbox for exchanging ideas about methods of curbing or eliminating it.
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Via Anil Dash, the solution to a long-standing annoyance of mine. Adobe is in a tight race with Microsoft for feature bloat, as evidenced by the ridiculous start-up time of Adobe Reader. Add to that the fact that viewing PDFs in your browser crashes the damn thing about 50% of the time, and basically I want to urinate on the entire PDF standard. But on to the solution:
- If you have Adobe Reader 6, upgrade to 7. It’s actually less bloated.
- Use Adobe Reader SpeedUp to disable all of the useless plugins that Adobe Reader loads on startup.
- Disable Adobe Reader from displaying PDFs in your browser. You know it’s just asking for trouble. In Adobe Reader 7, go to Edit > Preferences, select Internet, and uncheck the box for “Display PDF in browser.”
I’m sick of seeing my nice web stats polluted by referrer (referer) spam. Some clown at gb.com decided to go nuts with spamming my site, so via a quick Google to this site, I set up this mod_rewrite rule in my .htaccess file to blow up the spammers.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} gb\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.*$ - [F,L]
UPDATE 1/9/04: ILoveJackDaniels.com has an excellent page on combatting referrer spam.
UPDATE 1/25/04: Fighting spam with .htaccess is an unwinnable battle, but if you’re committed to it, I suggest adding this rule to block .info and .biz domains that contain hyphens:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} [a-z]+\-[a-z]+\.(biz|info) [NC]
It’s also a good idea to block domains that go nuts with hyphens in the subdomain and domain, since these are almost always the spawn of spammers. I suppose you could catch a false positive here, but it’s unlikely.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} [a-z]+\-[a-z]+\-[-a-z]+\.[-a-z]+\.(com|net|org|biz|info) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} [a-z]+\-[-a-z]+\.[a-z]+\-[-a-z]+\.(com|net|org|biz|info) [NC]
Really, though, you should check out my far more informative proposal to combat referrer spam.