Referer Spam

| posted in: nerdliness 


For some time now I have been using the excellent referer logging tool, Refer from Textism. It’s pure vanity and ego gratification served up in HTML.

It is also, it appears, a new place for the scum that are spam purveyors to ply their, ah, trade. I have been getting increasing amounts of “referrals” from adult sites that point only to my referer log. And today I got a couple of dozens hits from John Kerry’s blog.

Enough is enough. I edited the logfunctions.php file and added a line to not record any referers to the referer index page itself. Spot testing from various search engines shows it appears to be working. Now I’ll have to wait a few days to see if my fix actually eliminates the unwanted parasites from my site.

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Mark H. Nichols

I am a husband, cellist, code prole, nerd, technologist, and all around good guy living and working in fly-over country. You should follow me on Mastodon.