Capn Design Archives: Referrer Spam is Out of Control

Referrer Spam is Out of Control

July 22, 2004

This week, I have been trying to tackle my referrer spam. It has gotten terrible. I have looked in a number of places (botwack and diveintomark), but I can't seem to figure it out. I'm guessing the main reason I couldn't figure this out is because I don't really understand it, but I'm wondering if something has gone wrong.

So, could someone help me out please? Here is the source for refer.php (with the server login bits removed) so you can see what I'm up to. If you can help me, I'd really appreciate it.

Comments (2 comments so far)

Comment #1:

Three options...

1. Exclude any referers to your homepage, since that's usually where spammers hit first. (I recommend this one.)

2. Incrementally add every spammer's URL to your PHP script in the "ipwhack" section.

3. Get rid of Refer.

Posted by Andy Baio on July 22, 2004 at 10:11PM

Comment #2:

I can't seem to get ipwhack to work, but that's my problem. I'm not quite ready to give up on Refer, so I came up with an interim solution since I don't know how well this will scale.

As of right now, I made a change in the display.php file so that it won't display certain IPs that are spamming me. Here is the code snippet, for those who are curious. It looks like it's working well, even the code isn't all that elegant.

So, I'm okay for the moment.

Posted by Matt on July 22, 2004 at 11:04PM

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