{"id":264,"date":"2005-01-18T01:49:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-18T01:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/WebDev\/Blosxom\/plugins\/deferer\/deferer-0-1i.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"deferer-0-1i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/2005\/01\/18\/deferer-0-1i\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Referer Spam with deferer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been getting swamped by referer spam lately. Most of it is for domains that appear to have had hosting suspended. I had already seen a correlation between this referer spam and comment spam; what I didn’t know (but should have guessed) is that lots<\/em> of folks are seing this. Tim Bray wrote about the problem<\/a> today, pointing to more info from John Sinteur<\/a> and Ann Elisabeth<\/a>. Apparently all of these referer URIs resolve to a single webhost, with an IP of 161.58.59.8. <\/p>\n

Ann’s post is one of many on her blog<\/a> about the subject, she is actively pursuing this and trying to get Verio to pull the miscreant’s hosting. I suggest reading everything on her homepage for lots of good info.<\/p>\n

John’s post on the WordPress support blog includes PHP code that sends a 301 Moved Permanently<\/code> redirection header to any request with a referer URI that resolves to the IP above. Where does he redirect them? Back to the referer URI, of course.<\/p>\n

Now, that’s an idea I like. I liked it so much I wrote a perl version as a Blosxom<\/a> plugin. It’s called deferer, and is available here<\/a>. Right now, it’s a one-trick pony, but (when time permits) I intend to expand it to a more comprehensive referer spam solution. I don’t know how effective redirecting these requests is- the spider scripts sending the requests may not follow redirects. Even so, deferer reduces server load (it ends the blosxom invocation early) and saves bandwidth.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Deferer has been updated to version 0+2i, to fix a bug that caused a 500 Server Error<\/code> if the referer hostname could not be resolved.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been getting swamped by referer spam lately. Most of it is for domains that appear to have had hosting suspended. I had already seen a correlation between this referer spam and comment spam; what I didn’t know (but should have guessed) is that lots of folks are seing this. Tim Bray wrote about the […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deferer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}