Referrer Spam
I hate these people so much. If I ever found them I would hurt them badly. Has there been a spam-related murder yet? I could be tempted.
My question is how do they get so many IP addresses? I ban them at the network level in Linux, and they just keep coming back with more IPs. Can you spoof IP addresses? They're either doing that, or they're using zombie computers from all over the world.
The thing is, I no longer display raw referrer links on this blog. *I* see them when I log in, but I've taken away any incentive for referrer spammers to bother me any longer. But either they're idiots (well, we knew that already) or I'm just on a list and no one's taking me off. It's gotten to the point where I almopst don't bother even looking at my personal logs now, and rely on Technorati, Bloglines and Feedster to find link backs. (Keep up the good work guys). The other thing is that sometimes I get caught and click through on referrer spam links, and 99% of the time they aren't *valid* URLs any more. But I still keep seeing that link come through my logs for weeks afterwards, just to bug the hell out of me I assume.
A technical solution would be to add the referrer spam URLs to a big table as I find them and ban future queries with that referrer. But I worry about slowing down page views, as I would need to check against that ever growing table on every HTTP GET. I guess I could just keep that table as a filter for when I query for new referrers (selecting everything that's not included in the referrer spam table). But I hate the fact that my raw text logs are being filled up with this crap.
What I really want to do though is to be able to mark a URL as referrer spam, then the next time someone hits my machine with that URL as a referrer, a lethal electric shock is sent back through the internet into their computer, killing them and all of their referrer spamming family. (I'm thinking it's a genetic trait to be such an asshole, might as well wipe them all off the planet in one shot). What do you think? Too severe? How about just torture instead?
-Russ