Comments on: Killing Referral Spam

by: John

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:37:22 +0000

Hi there Excellent data. I was wondering, with respect to this sample line of code that you provided where and how would one type the country identifier for a domain such as mine, "larkin.net.au"?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.coldforged.org/.$ [NC]

Regards

John

by: Brent

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:54:15 +0000

I'm getting the following message when I click on the "this entire list" link:

Warning: main() [function.main]: openbasedir restriction in effect. File(/home2/coldfor/publichtml/scgi-bin/refer/refer.php) is not within the allowed path(s): (/home/coldforg/:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/tmp) in /home/coldforg/publichtml/source/viewsource.php on line 2

Warning: main(/home2/coldfor/publichtml/scgi-bin/refer/refer.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: Operation not permitted in /home/coldforg/publichtml/source/view_source.php on line 2

Warning: main() [function.include]: Failed opening '/home2/coldfor/publichtml/scgi-bin/refer/refer.php' for inclusion (includepath='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/coldforg/publichtml/source/viewsource.php on line 2 Unauthorized

by: Meryl.net

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:23:54 +0000

Poker Sites Screws up Web Stats

Jason talked about Disney showing up in his blog stats. The same thing happened to me around the time of his posting. Now, instead I’m seeing a flood of poker this, poker that, poker all the time showing up all over my stats. They showed up befor...

by: ddhr.org

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:17:32 +0000

[…] I tried using WP-ShortStat in the past, but stopped because I was getting tons and tons of referrer/referral spam, and all this spam was filling up my database. I looked into it and found a way to reject referrer spam by using .htaccess. I tried a few things out and it seems to be working great. I’ll be continually updating the keywords it uses to reject spam, but that’s something that I’ll probably be doing less and less over time. Tue, 07 Mar 2006 @ 11:15:54 in Updates Leave a comment Name: […]

by: William

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:43:06 +0000

Thanks For your work.

I think it's useful to many people.

by: The Life of Me. » Archives » Spaghetti & Spam

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:31:59 +0000

[…] them as their own, I called upon my good buddy ColdForged and his awesome tutourial “Killing Referral Spam” using creative .htaccess rules to stop the Refe […]

by: All Day Permanent Red » Blog Archive » Killing referral spam with htaccess

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 19:52:36 +0000

[…] great majority of referral spam. Check out this post at […]

by: AdamStac

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 01:25:31 +0000

CF, I finally got around to adding this solution since I have been inundated with spam comments, and spam referrers. Luckily I recently installed Spam Karma or I would be moderating over 114 spam comments in the last few days.

Two questions for you:

addforbidden.php can't make a backup of the original .htaccess file. I get 2 errors, can you help with this? (CHMOD=666) Would it be possible when accessing addforbidden.php that it would query the current .htaccess file to pull the current jerks already being blocked?

I wanted to get this installed before the month turns so I can see the difference in the stats of my web server. Very cool of you to share this with everyone.

Also, how did you add the "view source" feature?

by: kristy

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:11:38 +0000

wowo nice work, i think i may use this!!

by: Shadow

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 01:26:48 +0000

Another reason people use referral spam is because some blogs have scripts to pick up the most common referral addresses and link back to them. Just thought you might want to mention this in your article, because it creates a much greater incentive for spammers to use this technique.