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Alden Bates' Weblog

Feigning normality since 1973

Referrer spammers

Filed in: Spam.

I got my site stats updated (apparently there's something wrong with the auto-update feature in the latest copy of cpanel, and I've been having to put in support tickets to get the stats updated) only to find that since the 29th, some lousy spammer's been crawling my site with their referrer set to several spam sites.

Coming from random IP addresses (probably open proxies or zombie computers, they burned through some 50mb of bandwidth on the 30th, all to spam a couple of sites in the referrer. And I don't even publish referrer stats for my site, so they wasted their time and my bandwidth for nothing.

An unrelated spammer also hit me recently: I had some odd referrers from a few other blogs - when I checked the entries didn't have links to here on them (though one was clogged with comment spam) so I checked my logs, and found it Mr 61.234.149.52. He would hit my site once to load an entry page (with the referrer set to a random blog entry from elsewhere), then attempt to post to the comments script. As I've put a couple of extra commented-out <form> tags in my HTML, he was hitting the wrong URL and so didn't get anywhere. Fortunately he always came from the same IP address and so was dead easy to ban.

What a pain.

Posted January 2, 2006 5:23 PM

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