Hi All:
I don't know about everyone else, but Referrer Spam on my site has
reached epic proportions. I've been reading up on it, but one thing
still puzzles me.
If the referrer url is phony and the ip address from which it came is
phony, how does that benefit the spammer? It seems to me that the url
that got posted to a stats page would simply be a dead end.
Moving on - Since a lot of the spam urls have certain things in common
(ie., "porn", "foto", etc.) I can return an error code to a lot of
spammers via mod_security, but of course, the spammers don't care. They
wind up in the logs anyway. This raises some questions.
1. Is it possible to redirect the http request back to the referrer url,
thus letting spammers with valid urls spam themselves?
2. Is it possible, using the commonalities above, to prevent them from
getting into the log file? Can apache simply drop the request making it
appear there is no server running?
3. Can the referrer url be validated before accepting the http request?
4. Since my page shouldn't be linked to from anywhere else, except maybe
search engines, is it possible to create a sort of whitelist of referrer
urls and reject all others (letting the request drop into a black hole) ?
5. How about an rbl for referrer spam? (or did I see that somewhere
already. I don't remember.)
Anyway, anyone find a way to deal with it that at least reduces the
spam? My ISP graciously allows me to run a server as a hobby, but if
this spam keeps increasing, they're liable to consider me a commercial
enterprise.
Maybe we should get a thread going and see what we come up with (or was
there one that I missed?)
Any thoughts appreciated.
Regards,
Gene
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