Comment spam really sucks, but I’ve got stuff on here to fight it and it doesn’t slam me that hard. One that makes as mad or madder is referral spam. I have the dynamic list of incoming links below, and lately I have been beseiged by lots of bullshit in there. Robots crawl sites with bogus gambling, pron or pharmaceutical site URLs in the referer portion of the HTTP request, which puts them in your list. I’ve added stuff in the Blosxom referer plugin to validate the kosherness or non-kosherness of these incoming links. I don’t want to get too specific because I don’t want to make it too easy for the bastards at the other end of this arms race. There are a bunch of crap links in there right now, but no new ones should go in and those old ones should expire out pretty quickly. Who would think something as boring as a header field in the HTTP request protocol would be a vector for spam? Ahh, the law of unintended consequences.
Referer Spam
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A SPAM E-mail I got some time ago touted the power of the referrer tag to get higher ranking in Google.
I’ve been getting slammed by propecia ads. I just posted a note on my blog about it, too – I usually use humiliation as my best defense…
For me the chief offender has been byob.* and his relentless quest to promote online texas hold’em. I had 215 posts in the last couple of days. I throw up additional road blocks periodically, and he figures out a way to circumvent them.
What’s really amazing to me is just how much time he wastes doing this, as no comments appear on my weblog which aren’t approved by me. Absurd, really.