Referrer Spam - Followup
I thought I’d follow up my referrer spam entries with some details on the results of my efforts. As of this afternoon, instead of the blog server being bombarded with referrer spam hits, only 1.3% of the hits are referrer spam that are getting past my new redirection setup using Apache’s mod_rewrite module. Apache (the web server) is still getting the same amount of hits from those zombie networks but thanks to mod_rewrite, the resulting bad referrer page is only 854 bytes in size and doesn’t hit the blog application whatsoever. This means less traffic for sure, but more importantly, it means less strain on Roller (the blog application) and as result less strain on the database user by Roller. And when spam sneaks past Apache, 99% of that gets blocked by Roller, which returns a 403 error if there’s no referring link back to this blog. And when I see those in the Apache logs, I adjust the Apache configuration.
So how did I accomplish this successful referrer spam blocking. As I mentioned, I’m using Apache’s mod_rewrite module and started with a config file I got from Dave Child’s log. You can see that file over on Dave Child’s blog or if you want something more recent, you can the most recent referrer spam blocker file that I’m using.
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:48 Posted in Technology
