Forum Moderators: phranque
"<some company> Referrer Advertising System 2004"
and their provider is most of the time:
m001-02.bess.net
or is there any chance to ban people that were not referred by any website, but that try to add that kind of data?
or is there a list of software used for referrer spamming that i can block?
[edited by: jdMorgan at 9:13 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics, please. Thanks [/edit]
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
What is the goal of blocking their access? It makes no difference to them whether they get a 200-OK or a 403-Forbidden response from your server. Most of them don't check. They leave their name in your log either way, and don't care what response code they get back.
A bigger problem can be if they don't have the courtesy to use a HEAD request, and are frequently GETting a page of yours that happens to be very large. At some point, this could become a bandwidth issue. In this case, simpy redirecting them internally to a zero-byte page might be considered as self-defense. They'll get a 200-OK, but not waste any more of your bandwidth than that required by the response header itself (no content).
If you don't want to see them in your logs, perhaps you could black-hole them at your firewall, or use an IP trap at the main server config level if you're using virtual hosting.
Yes, they are an annoyance, but luckily, that business model stinks. Smart companies don't spam webmasters, because the majority will be annoyed and not buy, and those annoyed webmasters may do things to them negative-publicity-wise. They come and go, usually after a very short period of time (months).
Jim
