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Now in my "Who's Online" block some porn sites are apparently hitting my site a couple of times just to appear in the "top referrer" block. Just them names of some of the guys what are appearing there are enough to scare off some advertisers.

I tried to send an example of what's happening, and I got a "spam detected, post deleted" message. Just hit the website at www.panama-guide.com and you'll see what I mean.

What's the best way to stop this? Thanks.

Don

As far as I remember there was a hint somewhere not to display the "who is online block" to non logged in users.

Post by me here and at gllabs.org also got deleted, there is something wrong with spam-x I believe. I hate it anyway, it makes more problems than it helps.

You can't stop referrer spam (other than by taking down your site). Simply don't display the referrers, at least not to anonymous users. I thought everbody stopped doing that years ago anyway (at least that's what I've been saying in my webspam presentation :wink:

(And ignore Markus' ramblings about Spam-X - it has nothing to do with referrer spam anyway)

bye, Dirk

No it got something to do with his side sentence:

As I said more people than me have problems with Spam-x. It should not filter the posts of logged in users.

OK, thanks. I just took it down for anonymous users - fastest and easiest fix.

Don
http://www.panama-guide.com

No it got something to do with his side sentence:

As I said more people than me have problems with Spam-x. It should not filter the posts of logged in users.[/p][/QUOTE]

Actually, the problem occurred when I tried to copy and past the entire list of referring websites, and about three or four of them were from porno or spamming sites. So I guess that Spam-x picked up on the string of URL's and gagged on it. Whatever. What matters is that I was able to ask my question and to get an answer. Thanks again.

Don
http://www.panama-guide.com

Well, obviously when you're trying to post porn spam, Spam-X will consider you a spammer. Spamfilter's aren't that intelligent yet :wink:

bye, Dirk

Nope...thats why there are services like mine out there suspending the domain names of abusive spammers. <BG>

Michael

I'll leave this to the true pros to verify, but would code like this, placed at the top of lib-custom.php be useful for stopping certain referers at the door?

Short answer is yes. You should send back not found or something similar. Here's the voodoo:

But if you have access to your webserver's .htaccess file, that is the best place to do it. Google htaccess referrer spam and you should find some good tutorials (assuming you are using Apache).

As Joe said, do it in a .htaccess (or the httpd.conf, if it's your own server). That's easier to maintain and puts less load on the server since PHP and MySQL won't have to be fired up for the blocked requests.

bye, Dirk

Ah.. thanks guys! Now that you've said that I recalled the reason we had stuck that code in a site a while back... no .htaccess available there, so that was the quickest, dirtiest way around it. Maybe I'd better leave the ginko biloba ads in and order a little for my memory.